Measuring pesticide overuse and its determinants: Evidence from Vietnamese rice and fruit farms

Pesticides have long been important for the development of agricultural production. However, improper use of pesticides may result in inefficiency with respect to farm profitability, in addition to external effects of pesticide use on environmental and human health. This paper employs a production function that explicitly accounts for the role of damage abatement inputs (i.e. pesticides) in the production process, to examine the optimal use of pesticides. It then investigates determinants of pesticide overuse versus underuse and the intensity of overuse. The empirical application uses data on Vietnamese rice and fruit farms drawn from the 2016 Vietnamese Household Living Standards Survey. Results show about 95% of farmers overused pesticides for both rice and fruit farming systems. The Mekong Delta, also known as the ‘Rice Bowl’ of Vietnam, has higher levels of overuse on rice farms than two other regions. Overuse intensity is lower for female and poorer rice farmers while intensity is higher for those with more income and more family members. For fruit farms, younger farmers or those with more family members were more likely to overuse versus underuse pesticides.     

Price determinants in top-quality e-auctioned specialty coffees

We analyze the price determinants of specialty coffees traded at e-auctions. We hypothesize that since specialty coffees are a highly differentiated product, prices will be determined by both sensory and reputation attributes. To test our hypotheses, we estimate a hedonic price function using data from Central and South American e-auctions and calculate the implicit prices of sensory and reputation attributes. The results show that market clearing prices are a function of sensory characteristics and reputation variables including third-party quality ranking, country of origin, coffee variety, and quantity. The additional attribute information disclosed at e-auctions results in substantially higher prices relative to conventional commodity coffee market prices.     

Sovereign Debt Capacity and the Distribution of Domestic Wealth: A Common Agency Model*

This paper proposes a stylized two‐period, two‐country model illustrating the role of distribution of domestic wealth in determining a country's level of access to international lending. We model sovereign debt redemption policy in a common agency framework. Within this framework, policy is the outcome of the interaction between government and local and foreign interest groups with conflicting preferences on debt repayment. Our main result is that in full lobby competition, when all interests are represented, the only equilibrium solution is repudiation and the consequent inability of government to access international capital markets. Conversely, when the ability to lobby depends on wealth, governments can access international credit up to a given maximum external debt capacity, determined by the skew in the distribution of domestic wealth.     

中国股市奈何重挫？

【美国《华尔街日报》8月13日】中国消极的经济数据引发大陆股市大卖盘,因为焦虑重重的投资者担心通胀压力会损害收益增长。     

Herding in the strategic allocations of Spanish pension plan managers

This paper empirically examines herding behavior in the strategic style allocations of Spanish pension plan managers. The study uses both the standard metric used in financial literature to capture institutional herding and a new approach to address some shortcomings of this traditional measure. Concretely, some authors have highlighted that the traditional measure does not take into account that the probability that a manager buys rather than sells a certain stock depends on both the initial holding in the stock and the asset flows. As a consequence, this study proposes a new approach, which can be applied to other financial markets and provides more accurate values of the probability to increase (or decrease) the style exposures bearing in mind the previous exposure of each portfolio. The study confirms the existence of herding behavior by using both methods. Although the strength of this behavior decreases using the new approach, the herding levels detected in this study of style herding of Spanish pension plans are higher than those of previous research analyzing portfolio holdings in other countries. Additionally, herding levels are higher in periods of low volatility while market returns does not seem to influence herding levels.     

Flood Risk and Salience: New Evidence from the Sunshine State

A growing literature finds evidence that flood risk salience varies over time, spiking directly following a flood and then falling off individuals' cognitive radar in the following years. In this article, we provide new evidence of salience exploiting a hurricane cluster impacting Florida that was preceded and followed by periods of unusual calm. Utilizing residential property sales across the state from 2002 through 2012, our main estimate finds a salience impact of ?8%, on average. The salience effect persists when we base estimation only on spatial variation in prices to limit confounding from other simultaneous changes due to shifting hedonic equilibria over time. These effects range from housing prices decreases of 5.4–12.3% depending on the year of sale. Understanding flood risk salience has important implications for flood insurance and disaster policy, the benefits transfer literature, and, more broadly, our understanding of natural disaster resilience. JEL Classification: Q51, Q54, R21     

On the Equivalence between the APV and the wacc Approach in a Growing Leveraged Firm

While in a steady state framework the choice between the wacc approach ( Modigliani‐Miller, 1963 ) and the adjusted present value (APV) approach ( Myers, 1974 ) is irrelevant since the two approaches provide the same result, however, in a growing firm context the wacc equation seems to be inconsistent with the APV result. In this paper we propose a simple model to evaluate the tax savings in a growing firm in order to show under which assumptions the two approaches lead to the same results. We demonstrate that the use of the wacc model in a steady‐growth scenario gives rise to some unusual assumptions with regard to the discount rates to be used in calculating tax shields. We show that the widely used wacc formula, if used, as it is in most cases, in a growth context, implies that a) debt tax shield related to already existing debt are discounted using k_d; b) debt tax shield related to new debt, due to company's growth, are discounted, according to a mixed procedure, using both k_u and k_d. We discuss the inconsistency of such a discounting procedure and the preferred features of the APV approach.     

The consequences to analyst involvement in the IPO process: Evidence surrounding the JOBS Act

The JOBS Act allows certain analysts to be more involved in the IPO process, but does not relax restrictions on analyst compensation structure. We find that these analysts initiate coverage that is more optimistically biased, less accurate, and generates smaller stock market reactions. Investors purchasing shares following these initiations lose over 3% of their investment by the firm's subsequent earnings release. By contrast, issuers, analysts, and investment banks appear to benefit from this increased bias, as optimism is more positively associated with proxies for firm visibility and investment banking revenues when analysts are involved in the IPO process.     

Earnings Non‐Synchronicity and Voluntary Disclosure

Earnings non‐synchronicity reflects the extent to which firm‐specific factors determine a firm's earnings. Prior research suggests that high earnings non‐synchronicity impedes corporate outsiders' ability to process information. This study examines the impact of earnings non‐synchronicity on managers' decisions to provide earnings forecasts. We propose that high earnings non‐synchronicity motivates managers to issue earnings forecasts to reduce information asymmetry between managers and investors and to preempt costly information acquisition by outsiders. Consistently, we find a positive relation between earnings non‐synchronicity and managers' propensity to issue earnings forecasts, particularly long‐horizon forecasts. This positive relation is weaker when earnings are easier to predict based on the firm's earnings history and is stronger when the firm has higher institutional ownership and greater analyst following. We also find that the market's reaction to management forecasts increases with earnings non‐synchronicity. Overall, the evidence suggests that managers voluntarily provide earnings forecasts to alleviate the adverse consequences of earnings non‐synchronicity. These findings provide a more complete picture about the impact of earnings non‐synchronicity on a firm's information environment, and highlight the effect of the nature of information asymmetry on voluntary disclosures.     

Tourism competitiveness of Italian municipalities

Quality & Quantity - The purpose of the paper is the study of tourism competitiveness and its determinants for the almost 8000 Italian municipalities. The partial least squares method...