Vietnam’s continuing economic transformation has sharply increased the demand for highly-qualified business graduates. Vietnamese universities have responded to this increase in demand by improving the quality of their programs and raising their performance standards. The degree to which...

Lebanon is a complex country of extraordinary promise; often thrust into crisis, including recent military assaults, terrorist attacks and bombings. The authors share findings from a longitudinal field-study of the evolving political and business climate of Lebanon, emphasizing a particular MNC...

Analysts’ forecasting of earnings per share for multiple quarter time horizons of eleven agribusiness companies is evaluated using a mean absolute scaled error and a direct test. Results illustrate that unique information is consistently found. Rational and efficient expectations are formed...

This article presents a general method for pricing weather derivatives. Specification tests find that a temperature series for Fresno, CA follows a mean-reverting Brownian motion process with discrete jumps and autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic errors. Based on this process, we define...

The marginal forecast information contained in deferred futures prices is evaluated using the direct test of Vuchelen and Gutierrez. In particular, the informational role of deferred futures contracts in live cattle and hogs is assessed from the two- to twelve-month horizons. The results...

Conventional wisdom suggests the local cash - futures basis is determined from local supply and demand conditions. However, it may be the case that local elevators look to other locations, such as terminal locations, and adjust for transportation differentials when determining the basis for...

Several explanations for merger activity exist for publicly traded firms, but none consider the unique aspects of cooperatives. This study develops a test for the hypothesis that cooperative consolidation occurs primarily in response to capital constraints associated with a lack of access to...

While not ignoring risk, agricultural cooperatives tend to accommodate risk through the holding of internal capital reserves rather than engage in active risk management. A lack of information regarding the risk, returns, and the effect on cooperative financial performance of both traditional...

The traditional necessary condition for futures market inefficiency is the existence of alternative forecasting methods that produce mean squared forecast errors smaller than the futures market. Here, a more exacting requirement for futures market efficiency is proposed-forecast encompassing....

This research presents a systematic and unified approach to evaluating forecast rationality that considers the potential of nonstationarity in forecasts and realized values. The approach is applied to one-quarter ahead U.S. Department of Agriculture livestock price forecasts from 1982 through...