The issues related to proper assessments of the competitiveness of farming enterprises in general and of different type and locations has been among the most topical for academicians, agro-business managers, interest groups, administrators, politicians, international organizations, and the...

This paper investigates the impact of labour force composition on productivity in EU arable farming. We test for heterogeneous effects of family and hired labour for a set of five EU member states. To this end, we estimate augmented production functions using FADN data for the years 2001-2008....

This article analyzes the relationships between farm size and productivity and between farm size and profitability. A framework is set out to explain the inverse farm size--productivity relationship based on imperfections in the markets for labor, land, credit and risk. Hypotheses are derived...

We analyze the interplay between product market prices and firm boundary decisions. Enterprises are heterogeneous with respect to their productivities and each enterprise chooses between two ownership structures--centralized ownership (integration) performs well in coordinating managerial...

We present a North-South model of international trade in which differentiated products are developed in the North. Sectors are populated by final-good producers who differ in productivity levels. Based on productivity and sectoral characteristics, firms decide whether to integrate into the...

In the economics literature, measuring the performance of a dairy farm with a total productivity index is common practice. Previous research, on the other hand, has been chastised for failing to account for agricultural emissions in their models when calculating resource use productivity. This...

In this article, we use a stochastic frontier latent class model to estimate the technology of dairy farms according to their degree of intensification. The results are compared with a model which assumes that the technology is common to all farms. The empirical analysis uses data on a balanced...

Several recent studies have shown that not only exporters but also importers perform better than firms that do not trade. Using a detailed firm level dataset from 43 developing countries, I show that there are persistent differences in evolution of firms when they are grouped according to their...

The increasing role of services in GDP results from the growing share of service industries, but also from the fact that firms produce services along with goods. This paper investigates the determinants of service provision by manufacturing firms. First, it develops a model of differentiated...

The scope of this paper is to estimate the production function for the Brazilian industrial sector from a longitudinal panel of the industrial sector (Annual Industrial Survey produced by the Institute of Geography and Statistics-PIA/IBGE-and the Ministry of Labour and Employment's Annual...