The narratives characterizing the current debate on world agricultural research tend to be part of a discourse that rationalizes past experience and future tendencies along the lines of extreme recounts of successes and failures. Stories of agricultural development and of accomplishments of...

This report illustrates the application of a (relatively) new method to guide decision making under high (and unknowable) levels of uncertainty. The approach allows for the identification of robust policy options that are economically beneficial under different scenarios and varying levels...

This paper tests the hypothesis that portfolio diversification can increase the threat of systemic financial risk. The paper provides first a theoretical rationale for the possibility that systemic risk may be increased by the proliferation of financial instruments that lead operators to hold...

This paper presents a somewhat novel approach to explore the economic contribution of ecosystems. It develops linked models to capture connections between resource stocks and flows and the resulting micro and macroeconomic impacts. A bioeconomic model is developed that is imbedded into a...

This paper examines the controversial problem of the choice of the social discount rate in development projects, by focusing on the investment required to adapt to climate change, considering the threats to food security and the needs for human and natural capital, especially for developing...

The paper aims at modelling adoption and diffusion decisions of farmers towards genetically modified crops under a real option framework. Modern GM crops help farmers to resolve two main sources of uncertainty: output uncertainty and input uncertainty. Those crops represent a revolutionary form...

This paper investigates the recent evolution of the oil price, with the objective to analyze the main drivers that during last fifteen years have led the unstable path and the volatility persistence in the international oil market. We assume that the oil price is composed by two components,...

Financing technology poses a special challenge to economic institutions for several reasons. First, the uncertainty surrounding all the investment decisions is particularly acute and pervasive in the case of R&D, as well as developing and testing process and product innovation. Second, while the...

Society often sets social standards that define thresholds of damage to society or the environment above which compensation must be paid to the state or other parties. In this paper, we analyze the interdependence between the use of social standards and investment evaluation under dynamic...

The paper illustrates a theoretical model of real option value applied to the problem of land development. Making use of the 1998-2001 Kyrgyz Household Budget Survey, we show that when the hypothesis of decreasing return to scale holds, the relation between the threshold value of revenue per...