We compare the effects, on rural wages and farmer income, of public investments in either a traditional or a modern agricultural sector. The traditional sector has constant or decreasing returns to scale. Economies of scale that are external to farms in the modern sector create a possible engine for growth. We show that if there are moderate returns to scale in the modern sector, and labor has ...

A primal index of productivity change is introduced which decomposes exactly in three components: technical change, technical efficiency change and average scale economies (radial scale change). The proposed index is invariant to movement along indifference surfaces and it collapses to the Malmquist index if the technology is locally constant returns to scale. It is the best linear approximatio...

This paper discusses the determination of returns to scale (RTS) in data envelopment analysis (DEA). Three basic RTS methods and their modi®cations are reviewed and the equivalence between these di€erent RTS methods is presented. The e€ect of multiple optimal DEA solutions on the RTS estimation is studied. It is shown that possible alternate optimal solutions only a€ect the estimation of RTS on...

The supply and demand of credit are not always well aligned and matched, as is reflected in the countercyclical excess reserve-to-deposit ratio and interest spread between the lending rate and the deposit rate. We develop a search-based theory of credit allocation to explain the cyclical fluctuations in bank reserves, the interest spread, as well as credit rationing. We show that search frictio...

This study measures the performance of participating nations at the Olympics, considering the quest for medals as a two-stage Olympic process. The first stage is characterized as athlete preparation (AP) and the second stage as athlete competition (AC). We extend the relational model from the constant returns to scale framework to the variable returns to scale version. The efficiency of each pa...

A supply chain is a set of suppliers, manufactures and distributors, which are linked together. The first chain is a supplier and the last one is customers. What is the most important in supply chain are highquality products by the least cost and the most benefit. In this regard, each input and output and intermediate have unit price and unit cost information. The cost-minimization and the prof...

This paper builds on Cremer’s [3] seminal analysis which shows that (almost) complete cooperation can be achieved as an equilibrium in a game played by overlapping generations of players if the institution in which players cooperate is infinitely lived. We analyze a similar model in which the costs of cooperation are subject to random shocks. Even if these random shocks are very small, the rang...