This paper evaluates how different types of speculation affect the volatility of commodities’ futures prices. We adopt four indexes of speculation: Working’s T, the market share of non-commercial traders, the percentage of net long speculators over total open interest in future markets,...

We examine the value of terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We do this by conducting a hedonic analysis of vineyard sales in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to ascertain whether site attributes, such as slope, aspect,...

This paper analyses futures prices for four energy commodities (light sweet crude oil, heating oil, gasoline and natural gas) and five agricultural commodities (corn, oats, soybean oil, soybeans and wheat), over the period 1986-2010. Using CCC and DCC multivariate GARCH models, we find that...

Interactions between food demand, biomass energy and forest preservation are driving both food prices and land-use changes, regionally and globally. This study presents a new model called Nexus Land-Use which describes these interactions through a generic representation of agricultural...

We analyze the relationship between the prices of ethanol, agricultural commodities and livestock in Nebraska, the U.S. second largest ethanol producer. The paper focuses on long-run relations and Granger causality linkages between ethanol and the other commodities.The analysis takes possible...

This paper examines the relationship between biofuels and commodity food prices in the U.S. from a new perspective. While a large body of literature has tried to explain the linkages between sample means and volatilities associated with ethanol and agricultural price returns, little is known...

Funding adaptation requires adequate governance and there are different ways to organise and channel the funds to where it is most efficient and most necessary. This paper investigates this issue and studies the practical implementation of a development under conditionality, namely...

The United Nations General Assembly declared 2012 the “International Year of Sustainable Energy for All”, officially recognising the urgent need to put energy at the centre of the global development agenda. In parallel, a strong international policy effort is being made to achieve the goal...

The paper considers a situation where two countries – the North and the South – use a non-traded polluting input to produce the goods for final consumption. The North is more efficient in both, production and abatement processes. The study compares the effects of the transfer of abatement...

The paper develops a model in which a country with better technology for abatement of Green House Gas (GHG) emission (the North) commits to an international protocol to keep the global GHG emission within a specified limit while it helps the mitigation effort in the other country (the South)...