Since the late 1990s, the European higher education system has had to face deep structural changes. With the public authorities seeking to create an environment of quasi-markets in the higher education sector, the increased competition induced by recent reforms has pushed all publicly financed...

The use of climate information in economic activities, typically provided by climate services, may serve as a possible adaptation strategy to changing climate conditions. The present paper analyzes the value of climate services aimed at improving agricultural productivity through a reduction in...

Organic farming practices have environmental benefits compared to conventional ones. Their adoption is the result of a complex interaction of intrinsic attitudes of farmers, their profit expectations and farm policy incentives. We use an agricultural sector model and develop an extended version...

The purpose of this study is to assess empirically how the technical efficiency scores for 43 sub-sectors and their determinants over the period 2010 to 2017 show significant variation across the sub-sectors. The study applied a two-step approach for measuring technical efficiency and its...

This paper employs the concept of technology efficiency to analyse the optimal degree of specialisation of organic arable farms. Based on bookkeeping data from 461 organic farms, three technology specific frontiers (each representing a different degree of specialisation) and an all-encompassing...

The paper investigates the impact of subsidies and of para-agriculture on the technical efficiency of organic farms in Switzerland, Austria and Southern Germany. The data-set consists of bookkeeping data with 1,704 observations in the years 2003 to 2005. Technical efficiency is modelled using a...

In this paper, we consider how Russian Agriculture has developed since the constitution of the Russian Federation. The analysis is based on Oblast level data of 75 territorial units during the period from 1993 to 1998 and is focusing on technical efficiency (TE), technological change, and (both...

This paper studies the aggregate substitution and expansion effects triggered by changes in input prices, in a context where firms supply a homogenous commodity and compete in quantities à la Cournot. We derive a sufficient condition for the existence of a Cournot equilibrium and show that this...

This paper argues that the conventional definition of the elasticity of complementarity is not well suited to deal with the case of increasing returns. It proposes a slightly different formula, that uses a distance function formulation instead of a production function. The proposed definition...

At the firm level, revenue and costs are well measured but prices and quantities are not. This paper shows that because of these data limitations estimates of returns to scale at the firm level are for the revenue function, not production function. Given this observation, the paper argues that,...