Position limits for cash‐settled derivative contracts

Cash settlement of derivative contracts makes them susceptible to manipulation by traders who expect to close large positions upon final settlement. Cash settlement also increases underlying volatility when hedgers unwind their hedges if they have no incentives to control their trading costs. Limits on the positions that traders can carry into final settlement can be used to mitigate associated economic inefficiencies when surveillance is insufficient. This article develops a model that regulators can use to set these limits that is based upon microstructure theory. The empirical findings indicate that existing position limits are largely inconsistent with those suggested by the model. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 25:945–965, 2005     

A Varying Parameters Approach to Constructing House Price Indexes

Conventional housing price index models assume interperiodparameter stability and typically employ either repeat sales or hedonic methodologies. This paper introduces a method of index construction that combines multiple sales observations with single sale transactions while permitting characteristics prices from hedonic regressions to vary over time. A test for interperiod parameter stability is provided. Each period's data are arranged by location and repeat sales are matched by rows. This construction allows greater use of sample information and acknowledges the unique contribution of repeat sales to the estimation process. It also produces intertemporal error correlations that can be beneficially exploited by the seemingly unrelated regressions (SUH) technique. The paper also demonstrates a significance test for error correlation and discusses the treatment of unequal numbers of observations among index periods.     

Race,revenues, and college basketball

Customer discrimination may result in racial differences in the marginal revenue products generated by workers. College basketball data allow for direct comparisons of the racial differences in the marginal revenues generated by players. This article compares the revenue generating potential of the top black and white college basketball players. A highly skilled white college player generates over $100,000 in per game revenues as compared to around $30,000 for a black player of equal talent, providing a strong incentive for colleges to discriminate against recruiting black student-athletes.     

The New Issues Puzzle

Companies issuing stock during 1970 to 1990, whether an initial public offering or a seasoned equity offering, have been poor long-run investments for investors. During the five years after the issue, investors have received average returns of only 5 percent per year for companies going public and only 7 percent per year for companies conducting a seasoned equity offer. Book-to-market effects account for only a modest portion of the low returns. An investor would have had to invest 44 percent more money in the issuers than in nonissuers of the same size to have the same wealth five years after the offering date.     

The biological reserve: The future's last stand

This article addresses the societal and cultural aspects of bioreserves and environmental restoration programmes. It begins with a discussion of bioreserves, then uses the example of a Man and Biosphere (MAB) inspired study of the US Everglades to illustrate how land has been shaped historically by culture and technology. It then demonstrates how current conflicts of values and culture, from both inside and outside the region, from interest groups with both pragmatic and emotional stances, are determining the future of an environment—the Everglades. The article thereby shows how human values and perceptions impact on the development of a sustainable Everglades, using the findings of surveys and public meetings to highlight the interests of the competing communities, ethnic and interest groups involved. If bioreserves are to survive they cannot become alienated from the people in the regions in which they are located.     

Foodcrop Demand in Indonesia: A Systems Approach

Aggregate agricultural commodity demand parameters are estimated, based on an application of the Deaton and Muellbauer Almost Ideal Demand System to a seventeen year Indonesian time-series data set of prices, expenditures and consumption availability. The statistical results are generally significant and correctly signed. The revealed demand relationships imply that the Indonesian food Staples are normal goods. Expenditure elasticities are higher for the higher value foodstuffs than for the lower value starchy staples. Furthermore, the demand for rice has become highly inelastic to both own and cross-price interventions. This implies that rice price interventions will require a high degree of fine-tuning in order to stabilise prices effectively, and that low urban rice prices cannot be regarded as an appropriate, or even second best policy instrument for improving nutritional status.

A high degree of Substitution between rice and secondary food crops, and amongst groups of secondary food crops, is identified. The significance of the cross-price elasticities for the secondary food crops suggests that single-market interventions will have non-trivial budget-mediated effects in other commodity markets. The management of a multi-commodity food policy requires that the spillover effects from commodity pricing policy must be taken into account in order to optimise the effects of price policy interventions.     

Optimal new-product pricing in regulated industries

Intertemporal pricing issues faced by regulated monopolists in market settings characterized by high rates of innovation have received little attention in the regulatory economics literature. Most analyses of regulatory pricing have focused on monopolies characterized by a stable multiple-good product set. In a regulated industry characterized by technological change in the form of new products and services (such as telecommunications), optimal pricing decisions may also reflect intertemporal market and production factors. In this paper, two such intertemporal factors are modeled: learning curve effects on the firm's cost function, and customer demonstration effects on the demand side of the market. Inclusion of these factors leads to an intertemporal pricing rule that may conflict with the standard regulatory practice whereby each product or service must recoup its own resource costs period by period. Our results suggest that this regulatory practice can result in efficiency losses, since it results in a rate of technological diffusion that is too low.