Life insurance for endowment--great concept or a booby trap?

Life insurance as a charitable gift is an attractive alternative. But first the fund raiser must check out the companies and the different types of policies available.     

Price Discovery and Risk Transfer in the Crude Oil Futures Market: Some Structural Time Series Evidence

This paper re-examines the Garbade and Silber (1983) model with the objective of finding out if the crude oil futures market performs the functions of price discovery and risk transfer. The model is estimated, using daily data, as a system of two seemingly unrelated time series equations allowing the coefficients to be time-varying. The empirical results reveal that the futures market performs about 60 per cent of the price discovery function, and that the elasticity of supply of arbitrage services is adequately high for the market to perform the risk transfer function.
(J.E.L: G13, C22).     

The dynamics of some duopoly games involving the Market Share and Nichol strategies

The paper analyses the dynamics of some duopoly output games involving the Cournot, Market-Share and Nichol strategies. The model assumes linear price and cost functions and supposes that outputs are adjusted instantaneously at discrete time intervals. For all games considered, equilibrium is either reached after a finite number of moves or a stable approach to equilibrium occurs as t → ∞. In fact, apart from a few uninteresting cases, arising from the oversimplified form of the Market-Share strategy, all equilibrium points lie on specified parts of the firms' Cournot loci.     

A Stochastic Frontier Production Function with Flexible Risk Properties

This paper considers a stochastic frontier production function which has additive, heteroscedastic error structure. The model allows for negative or positive marginal production risks of inputs, as originally proposed by Just and Pope (1978). The technical efficiencies of individual firms in the sample are a function of the levels of the input variables in the stochastic frontier, in addition to the technical inefficiency effects. These are two features of the model which are not exhibited by the commonly used stochastic frontiers with multiplicative error structures.An empirical application is presented using cross-sectional data on Ethiopian peasant farmers. The null hypothesis of no technical inefficiencies of production among these farmers is accepted. Further, the flexible risk models do not fit the data on peasant farmers as well as the traditional stochastic frontier model with multiplicative error structure.