The private non-financial sector in Europe is facing increased challenges in meeting its debt servicing obligation. In response, governments are revisiting legal tools and—in some cases—institutional arrangements to deal with over-indebtedness. For households, where the problem in some...

This article develops and estimates an explicit-factor Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) model in an endeavor to uncover (a) the systematic risk properties of returns to agricultural assets, (b) the relationship between agricultural returns and returns on comparable-risk nonagricultural assets, and...

Holding commodity stocks is a major investment that commodity producers, merchants, and processors must continually manage. In this paper we study the conditional risk and return characteristics of commodities. We use a generalized method of moments estimator in a model of conditional expected...

Agro-biotechnology is evolving from a pre-commercial phase dominated by basic research science to a commercial phase oriented around marketing products. In pursuing innovation rents in the commercial phase, firms are reorienting their strategies around complementary marketing and distribution...

The competitive environment in the agri-food sector is evolving as the food manufacturing and retailing industries become more concentrated. Evolving industry structure and new firm investment portend changes in future firm competitiveness and performance. This research describes how large...

Evolving food preferences and business cycles have had differential impacts on the expected performance, risk, and cost of capital among post farm gate food industries. Expected returns to invested capital in 10 food manufacturing and four distribution industries are evaluated with respect to...

The latter 1990s witnessed rapid growth among the largest retail food chain companies, much of it through acquisitions. An explanatory motive is that grocery chains could achieve greater scale economies and operating efficiencies, and increase their bargaining power with packaged food...

We use Tobin's q model to investigate the impact of food manufacturers' advertising as an investment in intangible capital. Intangible capital value created by advertising relates to expected growth and economic rents derived from brand equity. We study the relations between advertising and firm...

A concern in the political economy is how national income is shared between labor and capital. This study evaluates long-term changes in factor income shares in three agri-food industries, their attribution to the level of factor usage or to factor compensation rates, and relation to changes in...