Crises and structural change in Australian agriculture

We present a model of structural change in the farming sector in which natural and economic crises decrease farmers’ work satisfaction, farm profitability, and the decision to stay in farming. Using data from the Australian Regional Well-being survey, activity choice modeling, and a structural equation approach, we test the hypothesis that these crises-induced effects then cause structural change in Australian agriculture. We find that external shocks, such as drought or economic downturn, negatively affect farmers’ welfare, which in turn causes structural change through revised activity choices. Our empirical findings also indicate that specific adjustment strategies such as buying additional water titles or reducing input use are insufficient to mitigate adverse crises effects.     

Small Farm Production and the Standardization of Tropical Products

This paper explores the historical relations between labour organization and product qualification in the production of tropical agricultural exports. In supplying international markets for tropical products, peasant farming emerged as the norm for labour organization after the First World War, competing with the large plantations and different systems of forced labour. During the same period, national standards became the dominant tool for product qualification of commodities traded on the global agricultural markets. These standards allow the creation of futures markets and the emergence of traders, instead of auction markets and commission merchants: two changes that were the basis of the subsequent international marketing of peasant-produced commodities. The last part of the paper considers the potential consequences of the current erosion of standards for the position of peasants in tropical export crop cultivation.     

Risk Preferences of Dairy and Hog Producer in Quebec

The objective of this study is to investigate the nature of risk preferences of Quebec dairy and hog producers. The direct elicitation of utility method is employed to determine producers'degree of risk aversion. The Delphi process is used to obtain more refined and realistic responses. The results reveal that the risk preferences of the randomly selected Quebec farmers are highly diverse. The percentage of risk-taking farmers ranges from 8% to 23% depending upon the level of investment and the nature of the enterprise. On average, the majority of farmers in both groups are found to be risk averse. Based on the differences between the means as well as distributions, although not significant in all cases, hog producers are found to be consistently more risk averse than dairy producers. Moreover, the gap between the two groups widens as the level of investment increases. The implications of this result are that the stability of farm income due to supply management in dairy sector may facilitate investments of a given risk (for example, adoption of a new technology) more so than it would in the hog sector.     

The inescapable need for fractal tools in finance

Summary. This short paper advances and defends a strong statement concerning financial modeling. It argues that, even when the present fractal models become superseded, fractal tools are bound to remain central to finance. The reasons are that the main feature of price records is roughness and that the proper language of the theory of roughness in nature and culture is fractal geometry.This revised version was published online in January 2005 with corrections to the Cover date.     

STRATEGIC ADVERTISING AND DIRECTED SEARCH

Imperfect observability and costly informative advertising are introduced into a standard directed search framework. Capacity‐constrained sellers send costly advertisements to direct buyers' uncoordinated search by specifying their location and terms of trade. We show that the equilibrium advertising intensity is nonmonotonic in the buyer–seller ratio. In addition, we also find that price posting dominates auctions since both mechanisms yield the same expected revenue, but the latter results in higher advertising expense. Finally, we find a positive comovement between market transparency and price for low market tightness when the measure of informed buyers is endogenous.     

Royalties,entry, and spectrum allocation to the broadcasting industry

We characterize the socially optimal trajectory of spectrum royalty and firm entry in a deregulated over‐the‐air broadcasting industry. A social planner maximizes consumers' lifetime utility by setting royalties for the use of publicly owned spectrum. As the number of broadcasters adjusts to profits over time, the quality of service improves through greater variety but also deteriorates through intensified interferences. Contrary to observed consolidation and return to concentration in past deregulatory reforms, we find that optimal royalty control that accounts for these quality effects steers the socially optimal trajectory of royalties and firms to a more competitive steady state.     

Wages,Productivity and Aging

In this article, we estimate age-based wage and productivity differentials using Canadian linked employer-employee data from the Workplace and Employee Survey 1999–2005. We use data at the workplace level to estimate production functions, taking into account the age profile of its workforce. Data on workers is used to estimate wage equations that also depend on age. Results show concave age-wage and age-productivity profiles. On average, we find that wages do not deviate significantly from productivity. For certain sub-groups, our results suggest some discrepancies between wages and productivity. This is the case for older workers with at least an undergraduate degree for whom productivity appears to be lower than their wages, while the reverse seems true for younger men. However, even in those cases, productivity differentials are too imprecise to draw any firm conclusions.     

What (if any) are the returns to computer use?

Using North American data, we revisit the question first broached by Krueger (1993 Krueger, AB. 1993. How computers have changed the wage structure: evidence from microdata. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108: 33–60. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and re-examined by DiNardo and Pischke (1997 DiNardo, JE and Pischke, J-S. 1997. The returns to computer use revisited: have pencils changed the wage structure too?. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112: 291–303. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) of whether there exists a real wage differential associated with computer use. Employing a mixed effects model with matched employer–employee data to correct for the fact that workers and workplaces that use computers are self-selected, we find that computer users enjoy an almost 4% wage premium over nonusers. Failure to correct for worker and workplace selection effect leads to a more than twofold overestimate of this premium.