The rapid rise in the price of crude oil between 2004 and the summer of 2006 are the subject of debate. This paper investigates the factors that might have contributed to the oil price increase in addition to demand and supply for crude oil, by expanding a model for crude oil prices to include...

A consensus that the world oil market is unified begs the question, where do innovations in oil prices enter the market? Here we investigate where changes in the price of crude oil originate and how they spread by examining causal relationships among prices for crude oils from North America,...

The principal tools used to model future climate change are General Circulation Models which are deterministic high resolution bottom-up models of the global atmosphere-ocean system that require large amounts of supercomputer time to generate results. But are these models a cost-effective way of...

For decades, the development of transportation infrastructure in the Brazilian Amazon has been the government’s main social and economic development policy in the region. Reductions in transportation costs have not only opened the agricultural frontier to cattle ranching and logging but have...

We use spatially efficient logit models to explore the role of economic incentives on the expansion of cropland in the Mato Grosso region between 2001 and 2004. An empirical measure for agricultural economic rent is used to quantify the desirability of a particular plot of land, which previous...