Economic, financial, and statistical applications in measuring firm performance: The case of Ohio commercial farmers

The issue of the firm performance definition and measurement has been studied by a number of researchers in different contexts. Although the literature is not consistent in the definition of firm performance or in the measure of firm performance used, several aspects of firm performance have been emphasized in different studies such as: profitability, risk, growth, production/technological efficiency, and personal satisfaction (or utility related measures in general).;The main goal or objective of this study was to study the different firm performance measures used by different authors, including their relationship among themselves and with a number of socioeconomic variables. Specifically, utility was related with other performance measures and with a number of socioeconomic variables.;The data set used for the empirical/statistical analysis comes from the Longitudinal survey of Ohio farm operator households for the years 1986-1990. Each year about 1,000 farm operator households were interviewed and the usable sample for merging purposes had a size of about 400. Such survey is managed by the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at the Ohio State University together with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The main statistical tools used for the statistical analysis were central tendency measures (mean, standard deviation, frequency analysis), correlation analysis, factor analysis, linear multivariate regression analysis, and logistic regression analysis.;In general, the statistical results obtained in this study confirmed the conventional wisdom that utility is positively related with education and farm income, while negatively related with financial risk. Moreover, the behavior of the variable "off-farm income" (negatively related with utility) does not necessarily contradict general beliefs although mixed feelings resulted from the behavior of such variable.