Three Essays on Economics of Quality in Agricultural Markets

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Book Synopsis Three Essays on Economics of Quality in Agricultural Markets by : Chia-Hsing Wang

Download or read book Three Essays on Economics of Quality in Agricultural Markets written by Chia-Hsing Wang and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: I simulate growth and quality changes for pens of cattle and derive the value of pre-harvest sorting and genetic selection under grid pricing in a deterministic setting featuring animals with heterogeneous growth and quality maturation paths. The key findings are: 1) both pre-harvest sorting and increased genetic uniformity could substantially affect an individual cattle feeder's net revenues; 2) one could expect higher marginal revenue gains from the genetic uniformity than from pre-market sorting; 3) both methods exhibit diminishing marginal returns and 4) aggregate beef supply may increase as improving uniformity typically leads to later optimal marketing dates and, hence, heavier animals at slaughter. Post-slaughter quality-based pricing of cattle is increasingly common. This quality, however, is dependent upon unobservable quality characteristics of the feeder cattle used as inputs and unverifiable effort exerted by feedlot managers. Through stochastic simulation I construct incentive compatible quality risk-sharing contracts based upon final grid-quality schedules in feeder cattle markets. Darby and Karni suggest branding as means of solving the potential fraudulence problems in the credence good market. Umbrella branding is a common marketing practice to promote new product and bond the product quality to the brand reputation. However, while umbrella branding works well in the experience good market, no evidence shows it would work in the credence good markets. I set up a framework for discussing the effect of umbrella branding on the quality provision of credence good. The results show that brand reputation, product similarity, probability of detection, punishment severity, and exogenous quality noise all play important roles in determining a firm's decision on umbrella branding and fraud.

Cattle, Contracts, and Grocery Retailers

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (68 download)

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Book Synopsis Cattle, Contracts, and Grocery Retailers by : Tian Xia

Download or read book Cattle, Contracts, and Grocery Retailers written by Tian Xia and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Three Essays on the Economics of Agricultural Production Behavior, Renewable Natural Resources, and Welfare Dynamics

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays on the Economics of Agricultural Production Behavior, Renewable Natural Resources, and Welfare Dynamics by : Steven Wayne Wilcox

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Agricultural Production Behavior, Renewable Natural Resources, and Welfare Dynamics written by Steven Wayne Wilcox and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The proportion of the world's population that directly interacts with agriculture and natural resources for their daily bread is declining amidst structural transformation (Timmer et al. 2009). Commensurately, the expectations and hopes placed on the remaining food and fiber producers in the world seems to ever increase, not only in terms of the provision of food and fiber, but increasingly in terms of environmental management and the conservation of intersecting natural resources (Blundo et al. 2018, Messerli et al. 2019, Wunder et al. 2020, Baylis et al. 2022). It is not a stretch to declare that there is a lot riding on the welfare of the food and fiber producers of the world (e.g., food security), and on the extent to which conditions that enhance the welfare of the farmer (gatherer) also enhance general welfare in matters beyond the direct provision of food and fiber (e.g., climate change, pollution control, and biodiversity conservation). To manage this state of affairs, the economics underpinning the production behavior of food and fiber producers and associated realized outcomes, are paramount to understand theoretically and to test empirically. In what follows, three applications are studied, each with a focus on a renewable natural resource of concern and an intersecting agricultural production sector where little to no empirical work has be done. The settings and questions are each broadly important and timely: * Do food price shocks cause deforestation, and if so how? * How do farmers decide whether to use managed pollination service markets, and are observed use patterns optimal? * Does the provision of index-based agricultural insurance lead to resource degradation, or improvement? Although on one level these topics are unrelated, the reality is that there are similar archetypal economic problems at the root of each of these questions, where the welfare of an agricultural agent, and the impacts from their production behavior, may or may not coincide with a social optimum. In chapter 2, evidence is presented that food price shocks, particularly for staples, can have significant impacts on deforestation (particularly through increases in price levels), that such shocks can drive smallholders to expand production broadly to address internal shocks to consumption and production, and that such land use change patterns can be casually miss-attributed to cash crop markets. In chapter 3, it is demonstrated that pollination dependent farmer's crop pollination behavior may be less static than has been presumed, that crop pollination behavior and production outcomes are influenced by adjacent land use and landscape heterogeneity, that there are diminishing returns to managed pollination use, and that reliance on pollination service markets is intimately related to the farmers production technology. In chapter 4, the roll-out of a successful index-based agricultural insurance product is studied at-scale, which theoretically might lead to resource degradation, or improvement (in this case for rangeland quality), and evidence is presented that resource degradation concerns may be over-blown, lending credence to the idea that addressing missing financial markets can enhance productivity and agent's welfare without degrading fundamental natural resource stocks.

Three Essays in Agricultural Economics

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ISBN 13 : 9781303443930
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (439 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays in Agricultural Economics by : Dingqiang Sun

Download or read book Three Essays in Agricultural Economics written by Dingqiang Sun and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in agricultural economics. The first essay addresses the impacts of liquidity constraints on household post-harvest commodity sales in China. I present a conceptual framework modeling the impact of a liquidity constraint on household post-harvest grain sales. Using data from China's maize farmers, I find that households with more debt, in general, sell their maize much earlier than debt-free households, thus potentially losing inter-temporal arbitrage opportunities. Segmenting the entire sample into wealthy and poor households, I find that the relationship between a liquidity constraint and post-harvest sales is apparent only among poor households. Using the occurrence of an illness in children or an elderly household member as an instrument for liquidity, I find that poor households in which there were children or elderly with sicknesses are more likely to sell maize early compared to other poor households. The second essay examines the impact of China's food safety standards on its poultry imports. I first describe changes in China's poultry safety standards and discuss unique characteristics of these measures. Then a Heckman sample selection model was applied to China's poultry imports from thirty one exporting countries from 1992-2009. I find that China's food safety standards, in general, have no significant impact on poultry imports from developed countries. Exporters in developed countries already meet more stringent regulations, and they easily comply with China's safety standards at no additional cost. However, a developing country has difficulty meeting the new standards. My econometric results indicate that improved food safety standards in China significantly reduce imports from developing countries.The third essay empirically addresses whether an importing country's use of an antidumping (AD) measure against distorts China's agricultural exports. I first present a simple three-country trade model in which an imposition of an AD duty by a country against an exporting country can distort exports. Using eight AD cases against China's agricultural exports between 1998 and 2006, I empirically investigate trade restriction and trade deflection effects. The results show that imposition of AD duty by an importing country against China significantly decreased China's exports to that country. My analysis also yields evidence that imposition of an AD duty by an importer deflects China's exports of the same product to third-country markets. I further document the heterogeneous effects in trade deflection across different importing countries. The results show that imposition of an AD duty against Chinese agricultural exports is likely to deflect exports to developing countries, rather than developed countries.

Three Essays on Agricultural Marketing

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 746 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (55 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays on Agricultural Marketing by : Kenneth Roger Weiss

Download or read book Three Essays on Agricultural Marketing written by Kenneth Roger Weiss and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Three Essays on Natural Resource Economics, Agricultural Policy, and Food Policy

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 112 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays on Natural Resource Economics, Agricultural Policy, and Food Policy by : Xiangrui Wang

Download or read book Three Essays on Natural Resource Economics, Agricultural Policy, and Food Policy written by Xiangrui Wang and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three independent papers in the field of Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics. The first paper is related to consumer-side water conservation policies. My coauthor and I introduce a structural water demand model based on the assumption that consumers are inattentive and apply a behavioral decision rule in water consumption. We found our model can capture our sample consumers behavior well, suggesting water conservation policies should incorporate non-price instrument to prod consumers for water saving. The second paper relates to the industrial organization and antitrust in the US beer market. My coauthor and I found that in a recent beer merger case, the justice department's divestiture requirement (a popular structural merger remedy tool) may not be effective in prevent merger brands' price from raising, at least in the short-run after the merger. This paper suggests that divestiture may fail as a merger remedy due to its certain idiosyncratic details. The third paper investigates the impact of corn production in US Midwest states on the US Reformulated Gasoline Program. We found that the US Reformulated Gasoline Program caused massive corn production in the Midwest, and the pollution from nitrogen-based fertilizer usage in agriculture reversely affect the efficacy of the Reformulated Gasoline Program, aiming to improve air quality.

Journal of Economic Literature

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (318 download)

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Book Synopsis Journal of Economic Literature by :

Download or read book Journal of Economic Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Three Essays on Market Efficiency

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (854 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays on Market Efficiency by : Thanasin Tanompongphandh

Download or read book Three Essays on Market Efficiency written by Thanasin Tanompongphandh and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation tackles the concept of market efficiency from three distinct topics in applied economics, from microfinance, to agriculture commodity market, and further to market microstructure of the most advanced economy. The first essay, entitled "Market Efficiency and Price Discovery Among Leading Rice Exporting Countries", focuses on the issue of rice market efficiency. The study establishes, under Johansen's procedure, that there are long-run price co-movements existing among the three major rice-exporting countries, and within the United States domestic markets, the long-run efficient linkage between spot and future prices of rough rice, as Chicago Board of Trade rough rice futures converge to United States Department of Agriculture rough rice prices in a cash market. Regarding the efficiency among the export market prices, results show that the hypothesis of market efficiency are rejected in two of the three pairs, namely Thai-Vietnam and ThaiUS(Arkansas). The Gonzalo & Granger (1995) decomposition method finds that the Thai and United States rice are dominant in the price discovery process. Within the United States domestic markets, the dominant is the futures market followed by the cash market of the rough rice and then the milled rice export price. The second essay, entitled "Determinants for Formal Credit and Informal Credit Access: The Case of Thai Farm Households", examines determinants for Thai agricultural households' participation in formal and its informal parallel credit markets. The study follows Heckman's two-stage selection model (1979) approach to determine the informal loan participation of Thai agricultural households. Results reveal that households tend to 'stick' to the credit market in which they were previously engaged. This finding reinforces the vicious cycle which makes it more difficult for farmers to get out of debt. Secondly, the study finds that wealthier households are less likely to access credit, and are more likely to participate in formal credits than their less wealthy peers. Results also show less probability of credit access between May and December coinciding with the planting and harvesting season accentuating the nature of loans as working-capital rather than consumption loans. Finally, the study discovers that households with owned farmland are more likely to participate in the formal credit market, while households with rented farmland are more likely to participate in the informal credit market stressing the use of owned land as collateral to participate in the former. The final essay, entitled "On the Challenge of Testing Weak-Form Market Efficiency using High Frequency Data", explores the issue of efficiency in microstructure of the Exchange-Traded-Fund (ETF). This essay shows that the profitability of a simple technical trading strategy hinges heavily on the way the Trades And Quotes (TAQ) dataset is filtered for mistakes and outliers. This paper uses ultra-high-frequency TAQ data that cover the time-span since the inception of the S & P 500 ETF from January 1993 to December 2006. First, a widely used filtering methodology proposed by Hasbrouck (2003) is adopted. Under this methodology, the technical trading strategy clearly outperforms the buy-and-hold benchmark. However, when a more appropriate (stringent) filtering methodology is used, the technical trading strategy clearly underperforms the buy-and-hold benchmark. This evidence suggests that studies that based their methodology on Hasbrouck's (2003) less stringent filtering criterion could produce misleading results.

Three Essays on Markets and Welfare in Sub-Sahara Africa

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (34 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays on Markets and Welfare in Sub-Sahara Africa by : Jenny Carson Aker

Download or read book Three Essays on Markets and Welfare in Sub-Sahara Africa written by Jenny Carson Aker and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Three Essays in Development Economics

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ISBN 13 : 9781392805114
Total Pages : 108 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays in Development Economics by : Joshua Gill

Download or read book Three Essays in Development Economics written by Joshua Gill and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number of people living in poverty is still very high and the progress we have made so far has been very uneven across countries, regions, and subgroups of people. Given that most of the rural poor derive their livelihood from agriculture, it has the potential to serve as a very potent tool for achieving the dual goals of poverty reduction and shared prosperity. However, the internal and external constraints faced by these households limit upward mobility. The three essays in this dissertation study how the rural poor in Pakistan make choices and how better program design can alleviate the constraints they face. The first essay investigates the participation decision of smallholder paddy farmers in a Warehouse Receipts Financing (WRF) program which can mitigate their credit and storage constraints, allowing them to increase their incomes. We a discrete choice experiment approach to study the decision-making process and find risk aversion and transaction cost erode the benefits for smallholder farmers making it an unattractive prospect. We find that likelihood of participation can be increased through better contract design which lower cost of participation and reduce exposure to price uncertainty. These findings have important implications for the optimal design of warehouse receipt financing contracts, as well as their general feasibility for marketing to small farmers. It also highlights that programs aimed to uplift smallholder farmers should not only address constraints of circumstance (e.g. access) but also internal constraints (e.g. risk aversion). The second essay aims to alleviate information constraints regrading fertilizer usage as its indiscriminate and faulty use can affect soil health. Evidence shows that soil quality in Pakistan has been deteriorating which can be partially explain by poor nutrient management. In this study we conducted soil tests and provided recommendations on use of organic and inorganic fertilizer.This study uses an experimental design with two treatment arms and a control group which received no information and its soil was not tested. The base treatment provided farmers with information on their soil health and recommended fertilizer use condition on the crops they cultivate. The second treatment arm complemented this information with a peer comparison which was used an encouragement mechanism to improve the efficacy of information provided. The study highlights some important constraints to information dissemination and provides some evidence on the use of peer comparison as a potential tool to improve efficacy of information campaigns. We see a statistically significant increase in manure usage and a heterogenous impact on Urea use but no impact on the overall fertilizer use. We find that farmers they were already using close to the recommended amount (within 1 bag deviation) increased their urea application rate. These findings suggest two underlying mechanisms at play. First, it alludes to liquidity constraints as farmers increased manure use which is cheap and those who could already afford higher quantities of Urea were able to respond to the recommendation of increasing application rates. The fact that we do not see impact on DAP further gives credence to this assumption as DAP is close to 3 times the cost of Urea. Alternatively, it could be that farmers who were away from the suggested fertilizer amounts did not trust the recommendations. The third essay studies the dynamics of warehouse receipts financing (WRF) demand by small scale risk averse farmers in Pakistan. A dynamic model is used to investigate how risk and time preferences, transaction costs, and uncertainty reduce demand for WRF, and even lead to non-participation in the program. The model is calibrated and solved for a representative small-scale farmer that grows paddy. Results show high transaction costs to be a major barrier to participation. Similarly, expectations about future prices also affect participation which drops to zero if the subjective probability of prices falling goes beyond 10 percent.

Giannini Reporter

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 32 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (321 download)

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Book Synopsis Giannini Reporter by :

Download or read book Giannini Reporter written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Three Essays in Applied Economics

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (144 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays in Applied Economics by : Asif Rasool

Download or read book Three Essays in Applied Economics written by Asif Rasool and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT Essay 1: In this study, we used agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis to group 2778 farming-defined counties into six clusters, revealing farm patterns across the contiguous 48 states of the United States. Economists have endeavored to identify patterns in US farming to understand the differences in economic performance and improve farm households' well-being. The US is a leading global producer and exporter of many agricultural and food products. Our primary objective is constructing a policy-relevant farm clustering to characterize agricultural homogeneity in US farms' production potential. We identify six relatively homogeneous clusters in five dimensions: farm size, farm assets, farm labor, farm output, degree of mechanization, and government programs. Minimizing diversity within a cluster allows for analysis of public policy changes on specific clusters and comparison of differential effects of the change across clusters. Essay 2: In this study, we developed the most comprehensive county-level datasets covering the 48 contiguous states of the United States to measure the impact of climate change on the US livestock industry. In the first part of our study, we utilized ordinary least squares (OLS) and Fixed effect (FE) models to perform both cross-sectional and panel analysis on five types of livestock: beef cows, milk cows, layer chickens, broiler chickens, and hogs. Unlike the general Ricardian approach in the literature, we attempted a novel approach using livestock inventory share as our models' dependent variable instead of land value. We found that climate change may or may not affect livestock inventory levels depending on the types of livestock and geographical locations. Increased temperature and precipitation may benefit a particular livestock industry depending on geographical location and production settings. However, we did not predict any adverse effect of climate change on any of the five types of livestock we analyzed. In the second part, we fitted our regression estimates to a climate model and projected the US livestock industry in 2070. Comprehending livestock and region-specific impacts of climate change will allow policymakers to craft better strategies and policies to combat and mitigate the adverse externalities of climate change. Essay 3: This study establishes a statistically significant negative association between public transit funding and private vehicle usage. We used the propensity score matching, genetic matching, and diff-in-diff frameworks to conduct county-level and individual household-level analyses to conclude that increasing public transit funding can successfully decrease private vehicle usage. Our results provide empirical backing for encouraging public transit funding as an intervention strategy to reduce private vehicle usage in communities. More specifically, the counties or households that received public transportation funding have lower average vehicle miles traveled (2.35 miles or roughly 6 percent on the county level and 1306.5 miles or approximately 6 percent on the household level) compared to the counties that did not receive any funding. We also conducted a longitudinal study to understand the causal impact of changes in public transit funding on county and household annual private vehicle mileage. This study uses four datasets. The 2019 National Transit Database Annual Data Products (NTD) provides public transit data. Transportation data are collected from the 2017 and 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). Data from the 2017 national census provide this study's necessary demographic and geographic data (United States Census Bureau). We matched observations from these four datasets at the county and household levels to create the panel datasets with 3138 counties and 4588 households from 50 states of the United States.

Three Essays on Agricultural Marketing in Developing Countries

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays on Agricultural Marketing in Developing Countries by : Aya Suzuki

Download or read book Three Essays on Agricultural Marketing in Developing Countries written by Aya Suzuki and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Economic Valuation of Animal Genetic Resources

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Publisher : ILRI (aka ILCA and ILRAD)
ISBN 13 : 9789291460632
Total Pages : 86 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (66 download)

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Book Synopsis Economic Valuation of Animal Genetic Resources by : J. E. O. Rege

Download or read book Economic Valuation of Animal Genetic Resources written by J. E. O. Rege and published by ILRI (aka ILCA and ILRAD). This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Three Essays on the Dynamics of Soil Conservation, Land Markets and Asymmetric Information

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (89 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays on the Dynamics of Soil Conservation, Land Markets and Asymmetric Information by : Kwansoo Kim

Download or read book Three Essays on the Dynamics of Soil Conservation, Land Markets and Asymmetric Information written by Kwansoo Kim and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Annals of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 42 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Annals of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics by : Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics

Download or read book Annals of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics written by Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Essays on Agricultural, Financial Economics and Education

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (88 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on Agricultural, Financial Economics and Education by :

Download or read book Essays on Agricultural, Financial Economics and Education written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is devoted to the study of three different topics under the advice of three different mayor professors. The only thing these topics have in common is the interest and curiosity of the author to explain real life events, using applied econometric techniques. Chapter 2 applies financial tools to assess whether stock values reacted across world markets to the announcement of indexes that synthesize the environmental performance of the world's largest publicly-traded companies. The environmental index selected for this purpose is the "Global 100 Ranking" (G100), a ranking of the 100 largest public companies by market capitalization. The results show that the market reacted to the "Global 100 Ranking" by changing the relative price of the stocks, but not the value of the portfolio. We also find that investors in US-traded stocks are more interested in past environmental performance than on managerial quality, while the opposite is true for investors in non-US-traded stocks. Chapter 3 estimates simultaneous equation models of barge and railroad rates for specific origin-destinations and grains (corn, wheat, and soybeans) in the US, using data from the Grain Transportation Report. Evidence of specific route competitiveness of various grains was found. Interestingly, it was possible to identify a railroad route with prices as complementary of barge rates, which may increase railroad market power. River levels affect barge rates, but there are differences for corn and wheat, possibly due to production locations in the Mississippi basin. Ocean vessel rates affect barge rates directly and railroad rates indirectly. Real exchange rates affect barge rates more than railroad rates. Evidence suggests that distance between railroad origin and barge origin affects the impact of the later on the first one. Chapter 4 studies the effect on early education achievement of keeping the same classmates as in the previous year by utilizing the unique nature of the Tennessee