The productivity of individual dairy farms, decomposed into efficiency and technological change components, was measured annually from 1985 through 1993 from distance functions estimated using nonparametric programming methods. Technology is measured regressively only if it is regressive to all...

In a competitive market dairy production will shift to that region which is the most productive. Thus, this paper reports the measurement of productivity of dairy production in the various states of the U.S. using recent Census data and non-parametric Malmquist index techniques. These are total...

The technical efficiencies of New York dairy farms were estimated using a frontier production function. The average farm was 69 percent efficient. Individual farm efficiency was regressed on variables not considered inputs to explain why a farm was not on the frontier. Favorable location in the...

This paper explores the role of managerial ability in determining efficiency in New York dairy farms. Using an unbalanced panel of farm data from 1993 through 2004, we estimate output-oriented technical efficiencies using stochastic distance frontier functions. We find that both lagged net farm...

The productivity of farmers at six different age cohorts was computed by estimating production functions using 1987 census data. The results suggest that farmers of different ages operate with slightly different technologies and use various inputs at different efficiencies. Compared with...

Farmer productivity by age was estimated, allowing for differences because of efficiency and returns to scale. Using Census of Agriculture data, estimates vary by state, but returns to scale average 1.07. Efficiency increases average 4.5 percent every ten years of age, to the age interval 35 to...