In this paper, the authors develop measures of plant capacity, plant capacity utilization, and technical change based on observed best practice performance in a given industry. These measures are calculated as solutions to linear programming problems that are closely related to those used to...

This paper starts with the basic premise that the conventional measures of productivity growth, which ignore joint production of good and bad outputs, are biased. We then construct an alternative productivity growth measure using activity analysis. An application to U.S. agriculture demonstrates...