The cost of milk production by farm size was decomposed into frontier and efficiency components with a stochastic cost curve using data on 755 USA dairy farms from the year 2000. The estimated frontier function is much flatter than the composite cost curve, and although the frontier cost of production decreases with farm size, that cost reduction is not as pronounced as a cost curve that includ...

The literature on the measurement of regional convergence at different spatial scales and over different time periods is extensive. This study explores the potential role of variations in European regional technical efficiency as a contributing factor in providing explanation for convergence or divergence. To control for spatial dependence among regions, the paper uses a spatial stochastic fron...

Productive efficiency for Chinese hybrid and conventional rice production is estimated using a dual stochastic frontier efficiency decomposition model. Results reveal significant differences in technical and allocative efficiency between conventional and hybrid rice production, and indicate significant regional efficiency differences in hybrid rice production, but not in conventional rice produ...

Despite remaining the most important type of animal production, pig production in Poland and Hungary declined after their accession to European Union (EU) 2004. This paper investigated evolution technical efficiency pork industry both countries. We applied stochastic frontier analysis, which takes into account heterogeneity environment functions countries—true random effects, a metafrontier mod...

In the standard stochastic frontier model, the two-sided error term V and the one-sided technical inefficiency error term W are assumed to be independent. In this paper, we relax this assumption by modeling the dependence between V and W using copulas. Nine copula families are considered and their parameters are estimated using maximum simulated likelihood. The best model is then selected using...

In this paper we develop an approach that synthesizes the best features of the two main methods in the estimation of production efficiency. Specically, our approach first allows for statistical noise, similar to Stochastic frontier analysis, and second, it allows modeling multiple-inputs-multiple-outputs technologies without imposing parametric assumptions on production relationship, similar to...