Too small to be beautiful? The farm size and productivity relationship in Bangladesh

This paper examines the agricultural productivity-farm size relationship in the context of Bangladesh. Features of Bangladesh’s agriculture help overcome several limitations in testing the inverse farm-size productivity relationship in other developing country settings. A Stochastic Production Frontier (SPF) model is applied using data from three rounds of a household panel survey to simultaneously estimate the production frontier and the technical inefficiency functions. The ‘correlated random effects’ approach is used to control for unobserved heterogeneous household effects. Methodologically, the results suggest that SPF models that ignore the inefficiency function are likely mis-specified, and may result in misleading conclusions on the farm size-productivity relationship. Empirically, the findings confirm that the farm size and productivity relationship is negative, but with the inverse relationship diminishing over time. Total factor productivity growth, driven by technical change, is found to have been robust across the sample. Across farm size groups, the relatively larger farmers experienced faster technical change, which helped them to catch up and narrow the productivity gap with the smaller farmers.     

Productive efficiency of specialty and conventional coffee farmers in Costa Rica: Accounting for technological heterogeneity and self-selection

A steep decline in coffee prices at the producer level led to considerable pressure for farmers in Costa Rica and producer countries all over the world. One possible reaction was moving to specialty markets, where price pressure was perceived to be lower. We use original survey data from 2002/2003 and 2003/2004 to analyze the factors influencing participation in specialty markets and to estimate separate production functions for specialty and conventional coffee farmers allowing for farm-specific inefficiencies. Applying a sample selection framework, we find significant selection bias in the sub-sample of specialty farmers and evidence for the overestimation of efficiency, if this bias is not adequately controlled for. Among the most important factors that influence farm-specific efficiency levels in the two sub-samples are the availability of additional income activities, experience in coffee cultivation, and membership in cooperatives. Based on the results, we derive policy recommendations to improve farmers’ production performance and ability to cope with the effects of the coffee crisis. These policy measures include the provision of extension services with respect to farm management skills, the creation of income opportunities in rural areas, and the support of farmer-owned cooperatives.     

论承包商的利润索赔

承包商的利润索赔是其对由发包人或监理人原因导致的利润损失所要求的补偿，合理的计算利润索赔额是维护合同双方公平地位的重要体现。文章介绍了建设工程利润计取的两种方法：成本利润率法和费用分摊法。分析了承包商进行利润索赔的背景和依据。研究了承包商可以进行新增利润索赔和机会利润索赔的情形，探讨了在成本（费用）增加、工程延期、工程量减少和合同终止等情形下利润索赔额的确定方法。并对承包商进行利润索赔提出了一些建议。     

Group Profit,Market Share and Efficiency: Evidence from Australian Manufacturing

This paper explains the intra-industry variations of profit in Australian manufacturing. Considering three groups of firms, viz leading, secondary and follower groups, a profit model is developed for each group. Indicators of ``strategic behavior' and ``efficiency' are considered along with other control variables. Both equilibrium and dynamic versions of the model are tested using unpublished data at the enterprise level between 1977/78 and 1992/93. The findings support the importance of both strategic behavior and efficiency in determining group profits.     

利润区指数模型:企业利润区定量分析范式

本文基于过程管理的研究思路,提出企业运营的内因势能和弹性势能概念,并根据企业运营过程中的势能状况来界定企业的利润区,选定关键环节的具体评价指标体系,建立了企业利润区指数模型,并采用超越对数方法对指数模型的具体函数形式进行逼近,最后利用上市公司生产经营的真实数据进行实证研究。结果进一步印证了利润区指数模型用于企业利润区定量分析的合理性。本文给出了一种企业利润区分析的定量研究新范式。     

Technical efficiency of alternative farming systems: the case of Greek organic and conventional olive-growing farms

Olive-growing is a major farming activity in Greek agriculture. This paper analyzes empirically the technical efficiency of organic and conventional olive-growing farms using a stochastic production frontier methodology and a translog functional specification. Findings indicate that the organic olive-growing farms examined exhibit a higher degree of technical efficiency (relative to their production frontier) than do conventional olive-growing farms. Reasons may include lower profit margins and restrictions on inputs permitted, thus forcing organic farmers to be more cautious with input use. However, both input- and output-oriented technical efficiency scores are still relatively low for both types of olive-farming. Thus there is considerable scope for cost reducing and farm income improvement in both farming modes. This could prove crucial for the long-run viability and the future course of the sector.     

The Effects of Megamergers on Efficiency and Prices: Evidence from a Bank Profit Function

This paper examines the efficiency and price effects of mergers by applying a frontier profit function to data on bank megamergers. We find that merged banks experience a statistically significant 16 percentage point average increase in profit efficiency rank relative to other large banks. Most of the improvement is from increasing revenues, including a shift in outputs from securities to loans, a higher-valued product. Improvements were greatest for the banks with the lowest efficiencies prior to merging, who therefore had the greatest capacity for improvement. By comparison, the effects on profits from merger-related changes in prices were found to be very small.     

Economy size and performance: An efficiency analysis in the telecommunications sector

The existing empirical evidence on the relationship between economy size and performance has been inconclusive. This paper employs stochastic frontier analysis to estimate economic measures of efficiency for the telecommunications sectors of 139 economies and examine their relationship with economy size. Simultaneously, it controls for the effects of competition in telecommunications, privatization of state-owned providers, independent regulators, and the quality of political institutions on sector performance. The findings suggest that economy size has a positive but decreasing impact on sector performance. Small economies have an incentive to grow to improve sector performance, though larger size is not a sufficient condition for efficiency. Sector policy and the quality of polity may contribute significantly to sector performance.     

利润概念之法学完善

利润是企业设立之目标,但会计的利润概念却未能揭示其本质属性。文章通过对利润产生依据的分析,以及对利得与损失计量依据的分析,提出了利润概念的新定义。利润是指会计主体的一定期间权利行使与责任承担的结果。     

Evaluating the impact of individual fishing quotas (IFQs) on the technical efficiency and composition of the US Gulf of Mexico red snapper commercial fishing fleet

This study examines the impact of individual fishing quotas (IFQs) on the technical efficiency (TE) and composition of the Gulf of Mexico red snapper commercial fishing fleet. Employing a parametric stochastic distance frontier framework we find that IFQs improved the TE of the vertical line and bottom longline fleets. Our results suggest that the observed TE gains were mainly driven by the retirement of less efficient vessels and, to a lesser extent, by efficiency gains of the remaining vessels. We also document changes in output and input distance elasticities and in returns to scale following the introduction of IFQs. The paper also investigates the impact of regulations and weather on productivity and the effect of crowding on TE. Policy implications stemming from these results are also discussed.     

企业要利润更要现金流

论述了现金流对企业生存发展的重要意义.针对电力企业应收电费存在巨额拖欠,导致部分售电收入的现金流无法回流的现象,提出有效的解决途径,并阐述了加强现金流管理还应关注的其他重要方面,以提高电力企业的现金盈利能力和可持续发展能力.     

Efficiency outcomes of market concentration and managed care

The paper examines how hospital cost efficiency has reacted to extensive horizontal integrations of hospitals and rapid growth of managed care in the US health care industry. Cost efficiency is estimated by using panel data approaches to relax the assumptions for the hospital effects imposed in earlier studies. The paper shows that higher managed care penetration over time is associated with greater hospital efficiency, and higher market concentration is positively associated with efficiency when markets are highly competitive or highly concentrated.     

油田企业利润的敏感性分析

运用敏感性分析法,对某油田企业利润指标变动情况进行了分析.该法不但可以预测单个或多个因素变动引起的利润变动程度,还可以预测出为了实现既定的利润目标所应采取的单项或综合措施,分析结论可为领导决策提供参考依据.     

我国工业企业技术资产利润贡献份额及影响因素研究

本文以2007～2009年制造业A股上市公司为样本,运用改进后的柯布-道格拉斯生产函数,通过实证研究测算了工业企业各项资产的相对效率及技术资产的利润贡献份额。研究结果表明:技术资产的利润率要高于固定资产及人力资产;技术成熟度不同、规模不同及所有权性质不同的行业技术资产利润贡献份额不同。企业应优化资本配置,提高投资效率。     

Can the small dairy farm remain competitive in US agriculture?

Smaller dairy farms in the US are observed to have higher costs than larger farms, and whether those higher costs are due to technology or inefficiency has implications for policy to address the small farm. If high cost of production on smaller farms is due to a higher cost frontier, then to make small farms competitive would require research to devise and design technology that is suitable for small farms. If instead high cost is due to inefficiency, then educational approaches are needed to ensure small dairy farms use technology efficiently. To determine the cause of higher costs on small farms, the cost of milk production by farm size was decomposed into frontier and efficiency components with a stochastic cost curve using data on USA dairy farms. Although the frontier cost of production decreases with farm size, that cost reduction is not as pronounced as a cost curve that includes inefficiency. The higher cost of production on many smaller farms is caused by inefficiency rather than technology.     

中国企业利润侵蚀工资问题研究

20世纪90年代中期以来,中国企业利润侵蚀工资问题日益突出。这种侵蚀引起分配结构显著变化,收入与贡献逆向偏离。不同行业和企业利润对工资的侵蚀程度有差异,批发零售和餐饮住宿业的侵蚀程度最高,其次是工业和建筑业。有些企业在利润侵蚀普通劳动者工资的同时发生高层管理者薪金侵蚀利润的现象。利润侵蚀工资具有多方面的原因,短期内难以完全消除。但是采取有效对策来缩小侵蚀面和降低侵蚀程度是完全可能的。     

Brewing Wars of Attrition for Profit (and Concentration)

Although research on industry structure, conduct, and performance has been important there are concerns that empirical applications inappropriately pool data from different industries and ignore the contributions of game theory. We avoid these concerns by investigating a single industry, U.S. brewing, in a simultaneous system derived from a game theoretic model. In spite of rising concentration in brewing, profits remained low because of a continuing war of attrition. We develop a measure of the likelihood of “war” and find that the type of game being played, as well as structure and conduct variables, is an important determinant of industry performance.      

论公共产权构成的企业利益关系

公共产权之中的个人产权,必须服从公共产权的约束,其利益也要由公共产权保护。股份制企业的法人产权是公共产权,代表企业利益。因而,以股东产权的权力组织为企业最高权力机构是制度性缺陷。在企业外部,还表现有行业公共产权,环境公共产权对企业产权的约束以及存在社会服务中的公共产权要求。现代的虚拟企业是一种新型的企业组织形式,更突出地体现了公共产权运作对于企业利益获取的重要性,说明公共产权有层次的区分和相应的管理要求。     

Production frontier methodologies and efficiency as a performance measure in strategic management research

The measurement of corporate performance is central to strategic management research. A common objective of this research is to identify top performers in an industry and their sources of competitive advantage. Despite this focus on best firms and practices, most researchers utilize statistical methods that identify average effects in a sample, and they assess a single performance dimension while ignoring other relevant dimensions. Emphasis on purely financial measures can overlook the fact that a firm's efficiency in transforming resources has been shown as a major source of competitive advantage. In this article we demonstrate how frontier methodologies, such as Data Envelopment Analysis and the Stochastic Frontier approach, can address these challenges. We provide an illustration based on longitudinal data from U.S. and Japanese automobile producers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Economic impacts of mobile versus fixed broadband

Broadband telecommunication service is growing rapidly and its economic impact is likely to vary considerably around the globe. Considerable interest is being shown in wireless broadband, especially in low income and rural areas. This study focuses on the direct effect (broadband penetration as an input), and separately, the productive efficiency effect of broadband (as an information network externality), using a model developed in Thompson and Garbacz (2007). Aggregate fixed and mobile broadband usage and their effect are analyzed and compared first on a sample of forty-three countries with sufficient data. The same models are used on samples of high income and low income countries. It is hypothesized that the rapid growth of broadband could have a stronger effect for low income countries and their initial levels of network development. Key variables are adjusted to a per household basis, using information on household size. Due to the endogeneity of key variables, instrumental variables are employed to estimate separate equations for mobile broadband and fixed broadband. Predicted values for these variables are used in the final equations in order to adjust for endogeneity and omitted variable bias. The results of the model estimated for the full sample indicate that mobile broadband has an important direct effect on GDP, but fixed broadband has an effect no different than zero. In the models with high and low income samples it is apparent that low income countries derive significantly more benefit from mobile broadband. Estimates from the Stochastic Frontier Model find mobile broadband to be a significant driver of growth via a reduction of inefficiency.