Maize is a major staple crop in Ghana which needs to be produced optimally towards food security and commercialization. In relation to this the study adopts the stochastic frontier model to analyze technical efficiency of maize farms in the Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana using a cross sectional...

Technical efficiency, scale and scope economies, marginal productive contributions for inputs and outputs, and efficiency drivers were determined for the Southeastern U.S meat goat enterprise. The average technical efficiency was 0.88. We find increasing returns to scale and scope economies for...

A group of 24 small manufacturing firms located in Santiago, Chile, that operate in four different industries was analysed in detail to assess the impact that technology assets (manufacturing equipment, vehicles, computers, etc.) have on the overall productivity of workers and firms. Using a...

There is a general presumption in urban economics that average commuting costs are increasing in city size. By analogy, it might be supposed that other spatial costs, such as distribution costs for utility services or access costs to schools and hospitals, will have the same characteristic....

The paper presents a decomposition of a production unit’s cost ratio over two periods into explanatory factors. The explanatory factors are growth in the unit’s cost efficiency, output growth, changes in input prices and technical progress. In order to implement the decomposition, an...

Over the past decades Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has emerged as an important nonparametric method of evaluating performance of decision making units through benchmarking. Although developed primarily for measuring technical efficiency, DEA is now applied extensively for measuring scale...

This paper studies the aggregate substitution and expansion effects triggered by changes in input prices in a context where firms supply a homogeneous 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 study proposes a use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for environmental assessment. All organizations in private and public sectors produce not only desirable (good) but also undesirable (bad) outputs as a result of their economic activities. The proposed use of DEA determines the level...

Credit unions differ in the types of financial services they offer to their members. This paper explicitly models this observed heterogeneity using a generalized model of endogenous ordered switching. Our approach captures the endogenous choice that credit unions make when adding new products to...

Credit risk is crucial to understanding banks' production technology and should be explicitly accounted for when modeling the latter. The banking literature has largely accounted for risk by using ex-post realizations of banks' uncertain outputs and the variables intended to capture risk. This...