[R] package for stochastic frontier models?

[Arne Henningsen]

Hi Aaron!

I hope that my answer is not too late.

On Friday 30 May 2008 00:31, aaront wrote:
> I need to estimate maximum tree crown radius and am looking for a package
> to prepare stochastic frontier models in R. I have not found any package
> references on Nabble R help, google, or R help. Any tips on a package for
> this?

The "micEcon" package [1,2,3] provides the functions "front41WriteInput" 
and "front41ReadOutput", which write input files and read output files for 
Tim Coelli's FRONTIER 4.1 software, respectively. This software does 
stochastic frontier analysis. A slightly modified version of it, which can be 
run non-interactively [5], can be used to estimate frontier functions in R 
with the micEcon package pretty conveniently. Furthermore, I have created an 
R package "frontier" [5] that includes and uses the Fortran code of FRONTIER 
4.1 as dynamic library. However, this package has not been thoroughly tested 
yet and I haven't received a permission of the author of FRONTIER 4.1 to 
release the package under an open source license and/or to upload it to CRAN 
(provisionally, he permitted me to make this software available on my website 
[5]). I am happy to receive bug (and success!) reports for this new package. 
(If somebody creates binary packages for MS-Windows and MacOS X, I would be 
happy to receive them to make them available also on my web site [5] :-) ).

[1] http://www.micecon.org/
[2] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/micEcon/index.html
[3] http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/micecon/
[4] http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/frontier.htm
[5] http://www.uni-kiel.de/agrarpol/ahenningsen/frontier/index.html

Best wishes,
Arne

> With regards,
>
> Aaron Trowbridge
>
> Researcher
> BV Research Centre
> Smithers  B.C.

-- 
Arne Henningsen
http://www.arne-henningsen.name