Consumer Valuations of Beef Steak Food Safety Enhancement in Canada, Japan, Mexico, and the United States

Food safety concerns have had dramatic impacts on food and livestock markets in recent years. We examine consumer preferences for beef steak food safety assurances. We evaluate the extent to which preferences are heterogeneous within and across country‐of‐residence defined groups and examine the distributional nature of preferences with respect to marginal improvements in food safety. Using mixed logit models, we find that consumers in Canada, Japan, Mexico, and the United States have willingness to pay preferences that are nonlinear in the level of food safety risk reduction. In particular, consumers in Japan and Mexico have preferences that are convex and consumers in Canada and the United States have preferences concave in the level of food safety enhancement. Les inquiétudes entourant la sécurité alimentaire ont eu des répercussions considérables sur le marché du bétail et le marché des aliments au cours des dernières années. Nous avons examiné les préférences des consommateurs concernant l'assurance de la sécurité alimentaire de la viande de b?uf. Nous avons évalué dans quelle mesure les préférences des consommateurs étaient hétérogènes au sein de groupes établis selon le pays de résidence et entre ces groupes, et avons examiné la nature distributionnelle des préférences à l'égard des améliorations marginales de la sécurité alimentaire. L'utilisation de modèles logit mixtes nous a permis d'établir que la volonté de payer des consommateurs du Canada, du Japon, du Mexique et des États‐Unis étaient non linéaires lorsqu'il était question de diminuer le degré de risque concernant la sécurité alimentaire. Les préférences des consommateurs du Japon et du Mexique étaient convexes, tandis que celles des consommateurs du Canada et des États‐Unis étaient concaves lorsqu'il était question d'accroître le niveau de sécurité alimentaire.     

Sequential Decision-making in Interdependent Sectors with Multiobjective Inoperability Decision Trees: Application to Biofuel Subsidy Analysis

Decision-making involving large-scale systems often involves considerations for temporal changes, interdependencies in organizational structures, multiple competing objectives, and risk and uncertainty, among others. In this paper we develop a risk-based methodology, the Multiobjective Inoperability Decision Tree (MOIDT). It integrates several dimensions of decision-making processes associated with interconnected systems in terms of: (i) evaluation of sequential policies; (ii) analysis of interdependencies; (iii) treatment of multiple objectives and their tradeoffs; and (iv) characterization of uncertainties. To demonstrate the integration of these four components, we present a case study to analyze the impact of government policies towards mass-scale biofuel production. Using a multi-period decision framework, the analysis utilizes economic input–output data to model the probabilistic demand adjustments for sectors that will likely be affected by biofuel policies.     

The world price of jump and volatility risk

We study international integration of markets for jump and volatility risk, using index option data for the main global markets. To explain the cross-section of expected option returns we focus on return-based multi-factor models. For each market separately, we provide evidence that volatility and jump risk are priced risk factors. There is little evidence, however, of global unconditional pricing of these risks. We show that UK and US option markets have become increasingly interrelated, and using conditional pricing models generates some evidence of international pricing. Finally, the benefits of diversifying jump and volatility risk internationally are substantial, but declining.     

Unravelling the dynamics of access to farmland in Tigray,Ethiopia: The ‘emerging land market’ revisited

This article uses ethnographic evidence from Tigray to revisit the debate on informal rural land markets in present-day Ethiopia. It explores informal farmland rental from a historico-anthropological, micro-analytical perspective in relation to the formal allocation of land use rights and to other informal land transfer practices. It shows how different rationales for land rental give rise to different socially embedded tenancy configurations. On the basis of this empirical evidence, the paper questions the appropriateness of the common idea that in Ethiopia ‘the land rental market is expanding’. It argues that research and policy thinking on land in Ethiopia could gain analytical power and relevance by adopting a less monolithic and abstract view on people's informal land transfer practices.     

New Futures Markets in Agricultural Production Rights: Possibilities and Constraints for the British and Dutch Milk Quota Markets

Farms are increasingly being affected by policies that involve production rights. Because of fluctuations in the prices of these rights in the spot market, farmers face a price risk. Establishing a futures market might enable them to hedge against this price risk. Rights futures have some features that differ from those of traditional commodity futures. This makes them an effective and efficient tool for managing price risk. The implications of these findings will be illustrated for milk quotas in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands. Prior conditions which might make a futures market for milk quotas successful in both countries will be deduced.     

Transport Infrastructure and Industrial Location: The Case of Thailand

This paper addresses the impact of transport infrastructure projects of manufacturing employment in Thai regions. After a theoretical review we consider the impact of various transport modes: road, rail and ports. We find that roads and ports have a positive impact on industrial location, although the size of the impact is modest. Labor appears to be a more important location factor in Thailand. For the analysis of the data, geographical information systems (GIS) appear to be a quite useful tool.     

A note on equivalence of consistency and bilateral consistency through converse consistency

In the framework of (set-valued or single-valued) solutions for coalitional games with transferable utility, the three notions of consistency, bilateral consistency, and converse consistency are frequently used to provide axiomatic characterizations of a particular solution (like the core, prekernel, prenucleolus, Shapley value). Our main equivalence theorem claims that a solution satisfies consistency (with respect to an arbitrary reduced game) if and only if the solution satisfies both bilateral consistency and converse consistency (with respect to the same reduced game). The equivalence theorem presumes transitivity of the reduced game technique as well as difference independence on payoff vectors for two-person reduced games.     

The airbus-boeing dispute: Implications of the WTO boeing decision

Editorial

The airbus-boeing dispute: Implications of the WTO boeing decision     

The race factor in social security

Conclusion A more complete analysis of the race factor in Social Security would expand from here in the following ways. First, projected earnings would be forecast for both races to compute race-specific benefit-tax ratios. Second, more complete family formation data would permit the projection of dependent-less benefit-producing events, not just spouse-less benefitproducing events. Additional computations would be performed for female workers and two-earner families. A satisfactory weight (or a rationale for the present one) would be assigned to survivor benefits. The end-result would be benefit-tax ratios for both races, not just for set-piece workers.     

An Empirical Portfolio Perspective on Option Pricing Anomalies

We empirically study the economic benefits of giving investorsaccess to index options in the standard portfolio problem, analyzingboth expected-utility and nonexpected-utility investors in orderto understand who optimally buys and sells options. Using dataon S&P 500 index options, CRRA investors find it alwaysoptimal to short out-of-the-money puts and at-the-money straddles.The option positions are economically and statistically significantand robust to corrections for transaction costs, margin requirements,and Peso problems. Loss-averse and disappointment-averse investorsalso optimally hold short option positions. Only with highlydistorted probability assessments can we obtain positive portfolioweights for puts (cumulative prospect theory and anticipatedutility) and straddles (anticipated utility).