Agricultural production quotas are policy instruments that many countries have adopted as a means of transferring income from consumers to producers. Here the partial equilibrium approach of Allais and Diewert is adapted to measure the efficiency loss in the production sector due to quotas....

Recent studies have revealed that LDCs have been taxing their agricultural sectors at rates of 40 to 50 percent. While it is widely acknowledged that this taxation might have significant allocative effects, this paper examines a cross-country aggregated agricultural production function. The...

Economic theorists for years have considered the possibility that the direction of technical change is altered by changes in relative prices. Prices have also been identified as one of the determinants of technical change through innovation. This paper extends the theory of the firm to cover...

In the corn ethanol industry, the ability of plants to obtain favorable prices through marketing decisions is considered important for their overall economic performance. Based on a panel of surveyed of ethanol plants we extend data envelopment analysis (DEA) to decompose the economic efficiency...

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...

We extend data envelopment analysis (DEA) to decompose the economic efficiency of a sample of ethanol plants into internal (technical and allocative) and boundary (marketing) sources. This decomposition allows us to evaluate the channels through which different plant characteristics affect plant...

This paper examines changes in agricultural productivity in 18 developing countries over the period 1961-1985. We use a nonparametric, output-based Malmquist index and a parametric variable coefficients Cobb-Douglas production function to examine, whether our estimates confirm results from other...