Spain occupies the first position in the European and Mediterranean rankings of citrus production and trade. In our analysis we assess the technical efficiency with which this sector is operating. The main objective of this study is to analyze productivity and technical efficiency of Spanish...

The concept of technical efficiency is critical to measuring the firm performance, determining the degree of innovative technology adoption and the overall production efficiency. Traditionally, technical efficiency has been measured as the ratio of observed output to maximum feasible output....

This article studies the influence of risk on farms’ technical efficiency levels. The analysis extends the order-m efficiency scores approach proposed by Daraio and Simar (2005) to the state-contingent framework. The empirical application focuses on cross section data of Catalan specialised...

Productive efficiency analysis is a relevant tool that can be used to evaluate differences in efficiency performance between conventional and organic farms. Such study is important for the assessment of the economic viability of these two agricultural systems. While the existing research has...

The arable crop sector (COP) occupies a prominent position within the European Union’s agricultural sector. Within Spain, the COP sector accounts for almost a third of total Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund expenses, and a half of the utilised agricultural area. The COP sector is not...

Previous research has ignored the influence of inputs on output risk when assessing the effects of decoupled income-support payments on production decisions. This paper studies the impacts of agricultural policy decoupling on output variability and mean by explicitly considering the influence of...

This research proposes a parametric estimation of the structural dynamic efficiency measures proposed by Silva and Oude Lansink (2009). Overall, technical and allocative efficiency measurements are derived based on a directional distance function and the duality between this function and the...

In this paper we assess how production costs and capital accumulation patterns in agriculture have evolved over time, by paying special attention to the influence of risk. A dynamic state-contingent cost minimization approach is applied to assess production decisions in US agriculture over the...

Our paper seeks to assess the decision to adopt organic farming practices. More specifically, we use Duration Analysis (DA) to determine why farmers adopt organic farming and the timing of adoption. We extend previous studies by including farmers’ objectives, risk preferences and agricultural...

In this paper we show how regime-switching vector error correction models can be used to assess the effects of food scares on price transmission along the food marketing chain. Our empirical implementation focuses on the impacts of the BSE crisis on price relationships and patterns of...