Testing the Empirical Relationship between Best Management Practice Adoption and Farm Profitability

Several "best management practices" (BMPs) aimed at reducing movement of nutrients, pesticides, and sediment into surface water resources have been developed and promoted by Extension and other agencies over the past several years. This study utilizes actual farm-level economic and BMP adoption data to rigorously analyze the relationship between BMP use and farm profitability. Results indicate that adoption of nutrient BMPs has a significant positive effect on net farm income (NFI) for wheat and corn, while herbicide BMP adoption, particularly use of BMPs related to the application of atrazine on corn, has a small (but statistically significant) negative impact on income. Adoption of soil conservation BMPs is not shown to have a statistically significant impact on farm income.     

Stochastic Conditional Intensity Processes

In this article, we introduce the so-called stochastic conditionalintensity (SCI) model by extending Russell’s (1999) autoregressiveconditional intensity (ACI) model by a latent common dynamicfactor that jointly drives the individual intensity components.We show by simulations that the proposed model allows for awide range of (cross-)autocorrelation structures in multivariatepoint processes. The model is estimated by simulated maximumlikelihood (SML) using the efficient importance sampling (EIS)technique. By modeling price intensities based on NYSE trading,we provide significant evidence for a joint latent factor andshow that its inclusion allows for an improved and more parsimoniousspecification of the multivariate intensity process.     

Gold options,an attractive investment instrument for the non-U.S. investor — the case of the Belgian and Dutch investor

Summary Gold has always been an investment instrument whose popularity is closely linked to economic and political instability. Since gold transactions occur in U.S. dollars any investor with a non-U.S. dollar base currency will therefore assume exchange risk exposure. Empirical evidence is given that the gold price has historically varied inversely with the strength of the U.S. dollar. The investor whose base currency is not the dollar, i.e. the Belgian franc or Dutch guilder, incurs less risk when investing in gold than his dollar counterpart.     

Seven Ways to Deal with a Financial Crisis: Cross‐Country Experience and Policy Implications1

This article presents a taxonomy of financial restructuring strategies that have been used by national policy makers to manage financial crises in the past. The goals of financial restructuring are to preserve or, if necessary, restore the debtor‐creditor relationships on which the economy depends for efficient allocation of capital, and to do so at minimal cost. Costs include not only the direct costs to taxpayers of financial assistance, but also—and likely more important—the indirect costs to the economy that stem from misallocations of capital and incentive problems resulting from the restructuring. Countries typically apply a combination of tools, including decentralized, market‐based mechanisms as well as government‐managed programs. Market‐based strategies generally aim to strengthen the capital base of financial institutions and borrowers using some mix of debt forgiveness and capital infusions. Government‐led restructuring strategies include the establishment of entities to which non‐performing loans are transferred as well as government‐assisted sales of domestic financial institutions, often to foreign entrants. Market‐based mechanisms can provide low‐cost ways of resolving the coordination problems faced by countries in the wake of massive debtor and creditor insolvency, particularly when those mechanisms are effective in achieving the desirable objective of selectivity—that is, devoting taxpayer resources only to those borrowers and banks that, with temporary assistance, will be capable of sustaining themselves in the future. But limiting their range of application mainly to developed economies, such market‐based mechanisms also depend on an efficient judicial system, a credible supervisory framework and authority with sufficient enforcement capacity, and lack of corruption in implementation. Although government‐managed programs may not seem to depend as heavily on well‐functioning legal and regulatory institutions, such approaches—especially the transfer of assets to government‐owned asset management companies—also rely to some extent on such institutions. Asset management companies are less likely to achieve their goal of resolving the overhang of debt at reasonable cost when legal and political institutions are weak and ownership of domestic creditors and debtors is highly concentrated. Especially in such cases, complexity and failure to consider incentive problems when designing specific rules governing financial assistance can aggravate moral hazard problems, unnecessarily raising the costs of resolution. Resolution mechanisms tend to be most successful when—like across‐the‐board debt forgiveness programs implemented through redenominations of debt—they are simple in design and afford quick resolution of outstanding debts, offering little discretion to governments while providing incentives for the private sector to work down the remaining debt overhang.     

Stadiums and Scheduling: Measuring Deadweight Losses in the Victorian Football League, 1920–70

Over a 50 year period, Australian Rules football's major league, the Victorian Football League, did not always use its largest and best-equipped stadium for regular season games between its most popular teams or schedule those teams to play twice in a regular season. We calculate deadweight losses from the use of capital goods (stadiums) and effects of match scheduling in this professional sports league. Such analysis has not been attempted previously because of the absence of a counterfactual. The welfare losses were significant but not sufficient to threaten the survival of a distance-protected cartel.     

Fighting vacation rental tax evasion through warnings to potential evaders

This paper uses differences-in-differences to analyze the effectiveness of messages sent by the Spanish Tax Agency to deter tax evasion by owners of vacation rentals. The results suggest that these messages were effective in the aggregate, as there was an increase both in the declared amount of such income (6–8.5%, depending on the line item under which it is declared) and in the number of filers (29.7–64.2%), and this effectiveness became more marked over time. Notably, there was more response to the intervention from the self-employed. However, in some collectives, the intervention produced the opposite of the intended effect.     

Commitment to Sustainability in Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises: The Influence of Strategic Orientations and Management Values

Ecosystem degradation and social sustainability have become important issues in the corporate sphere during the last few decades. However, research discussing corporate social responsibility and related concepts has often focused on larger companies, sometimes neglecting the specifics of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). The main purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between two common strategic orientations, market orientation (MO) and entrepreneurial orientation (EO), in relation to sustainability commitment, sustainability practices and management values in SMEs. Questionnaire responses from 450 Swedish SMEs were analyzed, confirming the influence of MO, EO and sustainability practices on commitment to sustainability, implying that firms committed to sustainability see both market and entrepreneurial advantages of sustainability. The results also show that different parts of MO and EO differ in importance for commitment to sustainability among SMEs. Implications concern the importance for firms and policymakers to work with sustainability issues using both internal and external perspectives. © 2015 The Authors. Business Strategy and the Environment published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd     

Complex Ownership Structures and Corporate Valuations

The bulk of corporate governance theory examines the agencyproblems that arise from two extreme ownership structures: 100%small shareholders or one large, controlling owner combinedwith small shareholders. In this paper, we question the empiricalvalidity of this dichotomy. In fact, one-third of publicly listedfirms in Europe have multiple large owners, and the market valueof firms with multiple blockholders differs from firms witha single large owner and from widely held firms. Moreover, therelationship between corporate valuations and the distributionof cash-flow rights across multiple large owners is consistentwith the predictions of recent theoretical models.