Estimating a Local Food Waste Baseline

ABSTRACT

This article estimates the amounts of food that is discarded, diverted, and landfilled in Minnesota by comparing and applying approaches and statistics from selected national, regional, and local studies. Our preferred estimates suggest 2.1 million tons of food is discarded in Minnesota, of which 60% is diverted through recovery and recycling efforts. The remaining 834 thousand tons are landfilled. This landfilled amount, considered as “food waste,” is smaller than the 1.3 million tons calculated using the ReFED (2016) methods, but its estimated distribution across the food supply chain is similar. Residential losses account for the largest proportion of food waste landfilled (43%). The processing and manufacturing stage discards the largest proportion of food (36%), but generates the smallest amount landfilled because of a high diversion factor. The range of estimates obtained from various methods highlights the complexities in choosing appropriate assumptions, factors, and datasets when calculating food waste baseline amounts.     

Timing the investment grade securities market: Evidence from high quality bond funds

We examine the ability of bond fund managers to shift assets between bonds and cash and across bonds of different maturities in order to capture the changes in their relative returns. As measured by estimated changes in portfolio allocations, we find strong evidence of perverse market timing ability between cash and investment grade securities, and our results indicate additional perverse timing across the bond maturity spectrum. Results are robust to an alternative performance metric. We present evidence that the survival of the majority of these funds despite their negative performance may reflect the value investors place on the portfolio diversification benefits of holding these funds.