Scale characteristics are key properties of production functions that determine optimal firm sizes, and have considerable policy implications for sectors undergoing restructuring. However, estimates of scale characteristics typically vary with the assumptions of the underlying empirical model....

While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple...

Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004;...

Hedonic land price models often use parcel size as an explanatory variable. Empirical analyses, however, are rather ambiguous regarding the direction and the size of the effect of this variable on farmland values. The objective of this paper is to investigate this size-price relation in detail...

This article investigates the role played by informational cost in agricultural land markets to explain price dispersion. Based on a hedonic model under incomplete information, we build a two-tier stochastic frontier. By linking costs of being information deficient to agent characteristics such...

In the 2011 post-Arab Spring migration wave, over 64,000 migrants landed on the southern Italian coast, with many of them potentially working illegally on farms through caporalato, a widespread system of illegal recruitment of underpaid farm labor run by Italian agrimafias. To test this...