This paper reports on an expanded and revised version of the spatial equilibrium model of the Australian dairy industry developed by MacAulay (1997). In the expanded version there is demand for five manufactured products. The transformation from bulk milk to final product is modelled by...

Rainfall during the germination, growing and flowering periods is a major determinant of wheat yield. The degree of uncertainty attached to a wheat-yield prediction depends on whether the prediction is made before or after the rainfall in each period has been realised. Bayesian predictive...

A problem with the use of flexible functional forms is that the estimated functions frequently violate the regularity conditions (eg, monotonicity, concavity) implied by economic theory. Sampling theory methods exist for imposing curvature conditions at all non-negative prices, but such methods...

Economic theory often provides information on the variables to be included in economic relationships (e.g., demands are functions of prices) and sometimes provides information on the signs and magnitudes of first- and second-order derivatives (e.g., homogeneity and concavity information)....

The total factor productivity (TFP) of a multiple-output multiple-input firm can be defined as the ratio of an aggregate output to an aggregate input. With this definition, index numbers that measure changes in TFP can be expressed as the ratio of an output quantity index to an input quantity...

Australian broadacre agriculture is typified by strong cross-commodity relationships, where sheep and cattle grazing enterprises compete for pasture and both compete with wheat and other crops for land. Further, some commodities produced by multi-product farms are also used in the production of...

Recent empirical studies have found significant evidence of departures from competition in the input side of the bread, breakfast cereal and margarine end-product markets. In this study we specify a general duality model of profit maximisation that allows for imperfect competition in the input...

Polluting technologies can be represented using output distance functions. A common approach to estimating such functions is to factor out one of the outputs and estimate the resulting equation using well-known stochastic frontier estimation methods, including maximum likelihood. A problem with...

Chambers and Quiggin (2000) have used state-contingent production theory to establish important results concerning economic behaviour in the presence of uncertainty, including problems of consumer choice, the theory of the firm, and principal-agent relationships. Empirical application of the...