2019 NOVA-PhD Distance Education Course Advanced Production Economics

Associate Professor Arne Henningsen (AH), University of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, Denmark
Professor Ioannis Karagiannis (GK) University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece
Professor Timo Sipiläinen (TP), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Dr. Yves Surry (YS) Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden.

M.Sc. or equivalent studies in economics, agricultural economics, farm management, and environmental economics. Undergraduate courses in microeconomic theory and calculus are required.

The objective of this course is to expose PhD level students to the foundations of modern production economics theory. Students will acquire skills and necessary knowledge to address and deal with production-related problems through the use of theoretical and/or analytical tools from the
microeconomic theory of the firm. We will also illustrate how to apply these production theory related tools to empirical and practical cases related to firm’s production decision making processes.

This distance education course is divided into two parts. In the first part, we provide a detailed description of the alternative primal and dual representations of production technology. For the primal, we start with single output technologies and the production function and then we consider functional representation for multi-input and multi-output technologies such as transformation and input and output distance functions. For the dual, we consider the cost, revenue and profit functions. Then we proceed with indirect representations of technology, both primal and dual, which are particularly useful when production units face budget or sales constraints. Finally, we consider the directional distance functions and the modeling of bad outputs. In all these cases, we pay special attention to the theoretical properties of the underlying functions and we show how we can use them to analyze the structure of production by means of returns to scale, various forms of the elasticity of substitution, and of course comparative statics results. The second part of the course is devoted to the application of these theoretical tools to empirical studies and in particular in estimating a production, distance, cost, revenue and profit functions using single equation or a system of equations by means of econometric methods.

Lectures will be provided through live videos connected through a video room located at SLU. The time schedule of all the lectures are presented below (see Table 1). In addition, weekly sessions are scheduled for students to meet and talk with the persons involved in the delivery of the lectures.

Provide to students all necessary material for analyzing production decisions and performance achievements at both individual and aggregate level using real data. This may include the analysis of the impact of policy changes in factor demand and output supply decisions as well as performance assessment by means of estimating efficiency and productivity measures.

To successfully complete the course students have to write a take-home exam that is scheduled in Monday September 16-Wednesday September 18, 2019.

NOVA PhD-Level distance education course on advanced  production economics

Forthcoming

To register, send an email to Stina Kling Olson (stina.kling.olsson@slu.se). Registration deadline is April 1, 2019.

Signing up for the course:
Max 30 participants:
Nova Students; Max 15 students
Bova students: Max 5 students
Other students: 10

Costs: No fees are charged to register and attend the course.
For more information on registration and other organizational matters: contact Stina Kling Olsson
(stina.kling.olsson@slu.se).

Time schedule of the course