Assessing farmers’ risk preferences and their determinants in a marginal upland area of Vietnam: a comparison of multiple elicitation techniques

We examine the consistency of risk preference measures based on eight hypothetical elicitation methods and a lottery game applied to smallholder farmers in a marginal upland environment in Vietnam. Using these measures, we identify influencing factors of risk aversion via regression analysis, whereby unlike previous studies, we include several proxies of social capital such as social networks and norms. Data were collected from household heads and spouses separately in a random sample of 300 households. Although correlations between most of the various risk preference measures are all statistically highly significant, most are weak. On average, respondents have a high degree of risk aversion and specific characteristics—gender, age, idiosyncratic shocks, education, social norms, network‐reliance with extended family, and connections to local authorities—are significant determinants of risk preferences across most elicitation methods, whereas others—the household's dependency ratio, wealth, and covariate shocks—are significant in a few methods only. The explanatory power of the models is limited, indicating that other factors are likely to be of greater importance in determining risk preferences. The results can help target safety nets, encourage investments, and lead to the development of more applicable methods for assessing risk preferences of smallholders in developing countries.     

Parisian types of ruin probabilities for a class of dependent risk-reserve processes

For a rather general class of risk-reserve processes, we provide an exact method for calculating different kinds of ruin probabilities, with particular emphasis on variations over Parisian type of ruin. The risk-reserve processes under consideration have, in general, dependent phase-type distributed claim sizes and inter-arrivals times, whereas the movement between claims can either be linear or follow a Brownian motion with linear drift. For such processes, we provide explicit formulae for classical, Parisian and cumulative Parisian types of ruin (for both finite and infinite time horizons) when the clocks are phase-type distributed. An erlangization scheme provides an efficient algorithmic methods for calculating the aforementioned ruin probabilities with deterministic clocks. Special attention is drawn to the construction of specific dependency structures, and we provide a number of numerical examples to study its effect on probabilities.     

Tests of the empirical classification of horizontal and vertical intra-industry trade

Tests of the Empirical Classification of Horizontal and Vertical IntraIndustry Trade. — Using longitudinal data this paper shows the separation of international trade in (a) inter-industry trade, (b) horizontal intra-industry trade, and (c) vertical intra-industry trade used in the empirical trade literature to be non-stable at the individual product level. The high level of vertical intra-industry trade mentioned in the empirical literature probably covers up many products shifting between e.g. vertical and horizontal intra-industry trade. The paper therefore questions the work of the last decade in the measurement of intra-industry trade.     

The Return to Direct Investment in Private Firms: New Evidence on the Private Equity Premium Puzzle*

This paper uses a novel dataset to analyze the return to direct investments in private firms by pension funds. We have two key findings. First, direct investments in private firms have underperformed public equity by 392 basis points per annum under conservative risk adjustments. Second, initial mispricing, due to over‐optimism or misperceived risk, and subsequent low capital gains seem to explain the gap in returns to private firms. Overall, these findings complement the finding of Moskowitz and Vissing‐Jørgensen (2002) of low returns on entrepreneurial investments and provide new insight into the existence of what they call the private equity premium puzzle: Even professional investors with well‐diversified portfolios like pension funds seem to get a poor risk‐return tradeoff from investing directly in private firms.     

Piggybacking strategies for nonprofits: A shared costs approach

This article presents case data and a conceptual foundation for nonprofit piggybacking whereby a nonprofit organization subsidizes its deficit producing primary mission by diversifying into related surplus-producing ventures. Shared common and joint costs are considered as supply-side bases for selecting among demand-side related diversification activities.     

Institutional Investors and Private Equity

Entrepreneurial finance literature has highlighted that institutionalinvestors are the main contributors to private equity funds.This paper complements these findings by documenting that institutionalinvestors also invest directly in private equity. A major concernfor such investments is the higher agency costs associated withprivate equity. We show that institutions invest in privatefirms with governance mechanisms that tend to reduce the expectedagency costs and risk of minority expropriation. Good governancemechanisms further allow institutional investors to enjoy thebenefits of syndication and thereby reduce idiosyncratic risk.In addition, we show that institutional investments tend tobe followed by further improvements in corporate governanceand tend to occur in high-growth firms within research and developmentintensive industries.     

Compensating Wage Differentials for Schooling Risk in Denmark*

In this paper we analyse the association between wage differentials and risk using detailed information on length and type of education as seen in Danish administrative registers. Our contribution to the literature is that we distinguish between transitory (time‐series) and permanent (cross‐sectional) income shocks, and estimate the compensation for both sorts of risk. We find that wage risk in a given education cell is associated with higher wages, while skewness is associated with lower wages. As a robustness check, we see that ad hoc risk measures based on earnings‐mobility indicators confirm these findings.     

UK money demand 1873–2001: a long-run time series analysis and event study

This paper performs a multivariate cointegration analysis of UK money demand 1873–2001, and illustrates how a long-run time series analysis may be conducted on a data set characterized by turbulent episodes and institutional changes. We suggest accounting for the effects of the two world wars by estimating additive data corrections, thereby allowing the propagation of war-time shocks to be fundamentally different from the transmission of peace-time innovations. In addition, the corrected series may be used in counterfactual event studies to assess the impacts of special events. In the empirical analysis we find a single equilibrium relationship relating velocity to opportunity costs, and we identify a significant link between excess money and inflation. After accounting for the turbulent periods, the equilibrium structure is reasonably stable over a period of 130 years. The empirical analysis was carried out using the OxMetrics software, see Doornik (2002). Ox procedures to estimate the vector equilibrium correction model with additive corrections are available from the author upon request.