This paper investigates the economic conditions of rural households in China. Historical survey data indicate that over 80 per cent of rural households earn less than 4,500 yuan in net disposable income each year, that for the vast majority of rural households disposable income is insufficient...

Both prices and the volatility of storable agricultural commodity futures contracts have been rising since 2005 and particularly since 2007. This paper aims to answer two principal questions: (i) How has the behavior of these futures prices over time and across maturities changed with the rise...

Long memory, and more precisely fractionally integration, has been put forward as an explanation for the persistence of shocks in a number of economic time series data as well as to reconcile misleading findings of unit roots in data that should be stationary. Recent evidence suggests that long...

Land is the most important agricultural asset. Income risk due to farmland price volatility creates economic hardship for rural communities. Although inflation explains much of the farmland valuation problem, it remains to some extent a puzzle. We use wavelet-based statistical methods supported...

Both prices and the volatility of storable agricultural commodity futures contracts have been rising since 2005 and particularly since 2007. This paper aims to answer two principal questions: (i) How has the behavior of these futures prices over time and across maturities changed with the rise...

This paper investigates whether the assumption of Brownian motion often used to describe commodity price movements is satisfied. Using historical data from 17 commodity futures contracts specific tests of fractional and ordinary Brownian motion are conducted. The analyses are conducted under the...

Economists who deal with time-series data usually take the unit root test as the ‘prerequisite’ test for a Brownian motion. It is typical for any researchers to apply a battery of well-known unit root tests to their models to confirm stationarity in the model specification. Nonetheless,...