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Article
How Reliable is Duality Theory in Empirical Work?
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
  • Francisco Rosas, Universidad ORT Uruguay & Centro de Investigaciones Económicas (CINVE)
  • Sergio H. Lence, Iowa State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Accepted Manuscript
Publication Date
4-1-2019
DOI
10.1093/ajae/aay071
Abstract

The Neoclassical theory of production establishes a dual relationship between the profit value function of a competitive firm and its underlying production technology. This relationship, commonly referred to as duality theory, has been widely used in empirical work to estimate production parameters, such as elasticities and returns to scale, without the requirement of explicitly specifying the parametric form of the production function. We generate a pseudo-dataset by Monte Carlo simulations, which starting from known production parameters, yield a dataset with the main characteristics of U.S. agriculture in terms of unobserved firm heterogeneity, decisions under uncertainty, unexpected production and price shocks, endogenous prices, output and input aggregation, measurement error in variables, and omitted variables. Production parameters are not precisely recovered when performing econometric estimation based on the duality approach, and the elasticity estimates are inaccurate. Deviations of own- and cross-price elasticities from initial median values, given our parameter calibration, range between 6% and 229%, with an average of 71%. Also, own-price elasticities are as imprecisely recovered as cross- price elasticities. Sensitivity analysis shows that results still hold for different sources and levels of noise, as well as sample size used in estimation.

Comments

This is a manuscript of an article published as Rosas, Francisco, and Sergio H. Lence. "How reliable is duality theory in empirical work?." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 101, no. 3 (2019): 825-848. doi: 10.1093/ajae/aay071. Posted with permission.

Copyright Owner
The Authors
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Citation Information
Francisco Rosas and Sergio H. Lence. "How Reliable is Duality Theory in Empirical Work?" American Journal of Agricultural Economics Vol. 101 Iss. 3 (2019) p. 825 - 848
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sergio_lence/69/