The value of a college degree is often quantified as the difference in earnings between those with and without a degree. The research presented here operationalizes this idea in two important ways. First, since future income and tuition are uncertain, a contingent claims model is developed and...

Purpose – This paper aims to identify factors that affect agricultural mortgage default and prepayment. Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of farm credit system loans, prepayment and default are modeled as competing risks with potentially non-stationary covariates using a...

Defaulting on a mortgage represents the ultimate consequence of past decisions to delay payment. While many modeling approaches are available to estimate the probability of default, most if not all require account-level data. Further, past research has not attempted to estimate the probability...

A balanced panel data set covering 519 U.S. agricultural banks is constructed for the period 1996S2005. Cost efficiency measures of agricultural banks obtained from stochastic frontier analysis and data envelopment analysis are regressed on various bank specific characteristics to explain the...

A mixed integer, goal programming model designed to aid in management of a meat packing plant is presented along with empirical applications demonstrating its use. Data collection, model conceptualization, model|data development, model refinement, and model use phases are discussed. The...

Farmers need information about the expected value and variability of net revenues for alternative crop insurance and futures hedging strategies to manage risk. Specifically, the model will determine which risk management strategies are most desirable under various levels of risk aversion. The...