Date Available

11-22-2021

Year of Publication

2021

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Document Type

Master's Thesis

College

Agriculture, Food and Environment

Department/School/Program

Agricultural Economics

First Advisor

Dr. Tyler Mark

Abstract

This paper attempts to estimate productivity and efficiency for Kentucky grain farms by applying a two-stage Date Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and DEA-based Malmquist method. The study covers the years 1999-2015. Also, productivity and efficiency testing hypotheses among different farm sizes and years are estimated. In the first step, productivity and efficiency indices are estimated through deterministic DEA. In the second stage, a panel regression is run with exogenous variables to explain the productivity and efficiency variation. In general small farms were found to be the least scale efficient compared to mid-sized and large farms, even though the results show overall productivity gain and technological improvements during the study. Therefore, small farms need to diversify their scope to survive due to a lack of scale efficiency.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2021.419

Download

Share

COinS