The architecture of the firm involves determination of a boundary that encompasses the functions managed by thefirm. The past decade has seen substantial reorganization of firms where vertical or horizontal integration has beenunbundled into weaker forms of collaborations including value chains...

The Mekong Delta in Vietnam has become an important production area for pangasius. The importance of the sector in providing an income to many households means that it is relevant to study its economic production characteristics. In this article we use a stochastic cost frontier model to assess...

Taken together, studies that examine how well commodity futures marketsperform find that risk premiums are common—and so unbiasedness is not—and marketsare not uniformly efficient across commodities or forecast horizons. This large body ofresearch sheds important light on whether and to what...

This bulletin furnishes farm sector financial ratio estimates developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. These estimates incorporate numerous revisions in estimating procedures and changes in available data. Nationaland State-level estimates of liquidity,...

The tables in this bulletin provide aggregate economic and agricultural growth, performance, production, and trade indicators for the world, 14 geographic regions, the Economic Community, Central Europe, and for 141 countries. These countries account for over 99 percent of the world population,...

Most, if not all, production technologies are stochastic. This article demonstrates how data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods can be adapted to accommodate stochastic elements in a state-contingent setting. Specifically, we show how observations on a random input, not under the control of the...

Bank operating statistics for 1980-91 illustrate important differences between agricultural and nonagricultural banks. The agricultural banks, with a higher proportion of agricultural loans, were more profitable overall, while having more securities and fewer loans. Most agricultural banks were...

The price structure of the beef-pork sector from the retail level back to the primary production level is evaluated in order to identify areas of inefficient performance. Results indicated efficient pricing performance between the slaughter and the retail levels. Results between the ranch and...

We use DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) techniques to determine if measured inefficiencies are caused by a missing management input. We replace the quantity of operators’ labor with estimates of the value of labor and management, and then with net farm income from the previous year, to...