TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY MEASURES FOR NEW ENGLAND DAIRY FARMS BASED ON A DETERMINISTIC STATISTICAL PRODUCTION FRONTIER

The purpose of this paper is to measure and explain the technical efficiency (TE) of a sample of New England Dairy Farms. A simple corrected OLS procedure is used to estimate a CobbDouglas production frontier which provides the basis for measuring farm level TE. The average level of TE for the sample is around 70 percent with a low of 48.7 percent and a high of 100 percent. Efforts to explain the variation in TE as a function of socioeconomic variables yielded extremely poor results