This article adapts a modern shortfall-based portfolio selection rule developed by Stutzer (2000) and Haley and Whiteman (2008) to the farm manager's land allocation problem. The approach provides a useful normative model of land allocation that obviates distributional assumptions and expected...

Using the 2000 US Census data, we explored the effect of international transferability of skills on the earnings of high-skilled US immigrants. We confirmed that education and labour market experience received by immigrants from Japan and English-speaking developed countries before migrating...

The <italic>Lake Wobegon Effect</italic> (LWE) describes the potential measurement-error bias introduced into survey-based analyses of education issues. Although this effect potentially applies to any student-report variable, the systematic overreporting of academic achievements such as grade point average is...

Using individual-level data from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, we quantify how workers' job satisfaction levels correlate with five schedule-based workplace flexibilities. The data permit us to control for numerous variables that might otherwise explain variation in the...

Using firm-level payroll data from the Midwest logging industry, I compute a worker’s productivity response to a change in piece-rate pay, an elasticity of effort, using an empirical specification developed in Paarsch and Shearer (1999). Maximum-likelihood estimation of an agency-based...

Using data from 39 first-price, sealed-bid auctions from three Wisconsin State forests, we examine the fragility of the sealed-bid auction portion of Athey and Levin's (2001) study of skewed bidding behaviour in US forest service auctions. The results of our analysis compare favourably with...

We propose a Generalization of Roy's (1952) Safety First (SF) principle and relate it to the IID versions of Stutzer's (Stutzer's 2000, 2003) Portfolio Performance Index and underperformance probability Decay-Rate Maximization criteria. Like the original SF, the Generalized Safety First (GSF)...

We construct a model of rent-maximizing behaviour by a single seller of timber in the absence of a formal market, deriving the stochastic implications of rent maximization for timber prices (stumpage rates) when other input and output (lumber) prices are random. Subsequently, we examine the...

This paper develops a simple, low-dimension portfolio selection rule based on minimizing the probability of realizing a return below some pre-determined benchmark or target rate. Unlike most shortfall-based methods, which employ approximations to the shortfall probability, this method operates...