This study has estimates a Fourier flexible production frontier to examine agricultural productivity in forty-one sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries during 1961-1999. The primary empirical result is that only nine of these countries experienced productivity improvements, while average...

Competitiveness in commodity markets is associated with a shift in the marginal cost as represented by Griliches k-shift. A distance function is used to estimate this shift as a combination of the rate an bias of technological change in the markets for corn, soybenas, wheat, and beef in U.S...

A dynamic model of productivity measurement that incorporates public goods is developed. Cointegration is used to estimate dynamic derived demands and economies of scale in US agriculture, 1948-1994. The impact of public inputs on the steady state stocks of private capital and their shadow...

Economic viability of the US corn ethanol industry depends on prices, technical and economic efficiency of plants and on continuation of policy support. Public policy support is tied to the environmental efficiency of plants measured as their impact on emissions of greenhouse gases. This study...

In this study we use data envelopment analysis to decompose the overall economic efficiency of a sample of ethanol plants into three subcomponents: technical efficiency, allocative efficiency and a new component we call marketing efficiency. The relative importance of these sources of efficiency...

Energy is a critical input in production and the main sources of energy in modern economies are exhaustible. Therefore sustaining aggregate consumption across generations requires reduction of the quantity of energy used per unit of output. Energy policies incentivize the deployment of new...

This paper analyzes the market and welfare effects of the introduction of GM products in small open developing economies that, prior to the adoption of GM crops, were net exporters of non-GM products. It explicitly accounts for differences in consumer attitudes towards GM products and producer...