Farmers incur proportional and fixed transactions costs in selling their crops on markets. Using data for Peruvian potato farmers, we propose a method to measure these transactions costs. When opportunities exist to sell a crop on alternative markets, the observed choice of market can be used to...

Earlier studies usually indicate that farmland prices and cash rents are not cointegrated, a finding that seems at odds with the implications of the present value model. The main objective of this study is to explore whether this absence of empirical support for the present value model can be...

The flagship of the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory reinvention initiative, Project XL has been touted as a "regulatory blueprint" for a site-specific, performance-based pollution control system. But widespread complaints about the costs of the program beg the question of whether...

This research advances four theoretical approaches in an attempt to relate the banking activities to the real economic activities. It starts with the Schumpeter’s circular flow of creditary production that argues that the banks start the production cycle for offering the credits that enable...

This study first shows that a transactions costs band may exist in commodity spot and futures markets and spatially separated markets as a result of the arbitrage process. Then, by using a bivariate vector error correction model (VECM), this thesis shows that the null hypothesis of linearity can...

This paper provides a profit-maximizing model with vessel-level dolphin mortality limits for purse seiners harvesting tunas in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The model analytically derives the shadow price (estimated economic value) for dolphin mortality, the fishing-fleet size, and the...

Using the directional distance function we study a cross section of 110 countries to examine the efficiency of management of the tradeoffs between pollution and income. The DEA model is reformulated to permit 'reverse disposability' of the bad output. Further, we interpret the optimal solution...

The research presented in this thesis addresses different aspects of dynamic portfolio construction and portfolio risk measurement. It brings the research on dynamic portfolio optimization, replicating portfolio construction, dynamic portfolio risk measurement and volatility forecast together....

Since the mid-nineties, agricultural economists discuss the suitability of “weather derivatives” as hedging instruments for volumetric risks in agriculture. Contrary to traditional insurance contracts, the payoffs of such derivatives are linked to weather indices (e.g. accumulated rainfall...

In this paper, we propose a framework for robust optimization that relaxes the standard notion of robustness by allowing the decision maker to vary the protection level in a smooth way across the uncertainty set. We apply our approach to the problem of maximizing the expected value of a payoff...