Measuring the cost of liquidity in agricultural futures markets: Conventional and Bayesian approaches

Estimating the cost of liquidity in agricultural futures markets is challenging because bid‐ask spreads are usually not observed. Based on an ability to reflect simulated data from Roll's spread model, we assess the effectiveness of conventional and Bayesian bid‐ask spread estimators under different market conditions. Conventional serial covariance and absolute price change spread estimators appear to be biased. Hasbrouck's Bayesian estimator generates small costs of liquidity whose values depend on the correlation and noise in the data. The absolute value Bayesian estimator is precise and works well under conditions of high levels of noise and correlation usually found in agricultural futures markets. Using data from live cattle (LC) and lean hog (LH) contracts, we find similar patterns of performance that produce economically meaningful cost of liquidity differences.     

Market games with differential information and infinite dimensional commodity spaces: The core

Summary We provide an alternative proof of the existence of core allocations in exchange economies with differential information and infinite dimensional commodity spaces. We also identify a critical feature of information sharing rules that ensures nonemptiness of the core. In essence, the only condition we require on the sharing rules is that profitable insider trading be prohibited. In the absence of insider trading, balancedness is guaranteed and core nonemptiness follows.I thank Dan Arce, Erik Balder, Myrna Wooders, and Nicholas Yannelis for helpful comments. This paper is a greatly revised version of my paper entitled. A Variational Problem Arising in Market Games with Differential Information, written in August of 1991.     

Financial leverage and market volatility with diverse beliefs

We study a general equilibrium model of asset trading with financial leverage, where the investors can engage in speculative trading with diverse beliefs about the asset??s fundamental value. We show that an increase in the leverage ratio causes the stock price to rise in the current period through a ??leverage effect??, and will result in more borrowing and more stock purchase that pumps the stock price higher in the subsequent period, known as the ??pyramiding effect??. There can also be a ??depyramiding effect?? when the price falls because lenders issue margin calls and force stock sales, contributing to further stock price plummeting. Price changes from depyramiding effect, however, may not take effect when margin calls are not triggered. We demonstrate that, under certain conditions, decreasing leverage ratios leads to lower stock price volatility, measured by the variation of prices caused by an exogenous shock, when the shock is unanticipated. The influences of dispersion of beliefs and available investment funds on the relation between financial leverage and market volatility are also examined. When the shock is anticipated, we demonstrate that reducing leverage ratios may not lower stock price volatility, which poses an important challenge to future studies on this issue.     

Multinationals and Training: Some Evidence from Irish Manufacturing Industries

This paper sets out to analyse the effect of plant and sectoral level characteristics on the provision of training to employees using plant level data for Irish manufacturing. There is no clear evidence that foreign owned plants are more likely to provide training. By contrast, we find that they spend less than domestic plants on training, ceteris paribus. There is also no evidence that plants that receive training grants are more likely to provide training. This may be likely to reflect the targeting of training grants on plants that are otherwise unlikely to provide much training. We do, however, find that training activity in the sector, either by other foreign or domestic plants, has a positive effect on plant level training activity, at least for domestic owned plants.     

Optimal Tariffs and Subsidies and Changes in Market Structure

The paper presents a unified treatment of optimal trade policy for a small country. The well‐known results for duopoly and competitive markets emerge as benchmark cases of the authors’ model. In addition, it is shown that changes in market structure have nonmonotonic effects on optimal tariffs. The results suggest that the recent reduction of tariffs in eastern Europe is consistent with welfare‐maximizing trade policy in response to the substantial changes in the market structure of these countries.     

Uncertainty and sustainability in the management of rangelands

We analyze a dynamic and stochastic ecological-economic model of grazing management in semi-arid rangelands. The ecosystem is driven by stochastic precipitation. A risk averse farmer chooses a grazing management strategy under uncertainty such as to maximize expected utility from farming income. Grazing management strategies are rules about which share of the rangeland is given rest depending on the actual rainfall in that year. In a first step we determine a myopic farmer's optimal grazing management strategy and show that a risk averse farmer chooses a strategy such as to obtain insurance from the ecosystem: the optimal strategy reduces income variability, but yields less mean income than possible. In a second step we analyze the long-run ecological and economic impact of different strategies. We conclude that a myopic farmer, if he is sufficiently risk averse, will choose a sustainable grazing management strategy, even if he does not take into account long-term ecological and economic benefits of conservative strategies.     

Contingent trade policy and economic efficiency

Review of World Economics - This paper models the competition for a domestic market between one domestic and one foreign firm as a pricing game under incomplete cost information. As the foreign...     

Income distribution and inequality measurement: The problem of extreme values

We examine the statistical performance of inequality indices in the presence of extreme values in the data and show that these indices are very sensitive to the properties of the income distribution. Estimation and inference can be dramatically affected, especially when the tail of the income distribution is heavy, even when standard bootstrap methods are employed. However, use of appropriate semiparametric methods for modelling the upper tail can greatly improve the performance of even those inequality indices that are normally considered particularly sensitive to extreme values.     

Optimal dynamic scale and structure of a multi-pollution economy

We analyze the optimal dynamic scale and structure of a two-sector-economy, where each sector produces one consumption good and one specific pollutant. Both pollutants accumulate at different rates to stocks which damage the natural environment. This acts as a dynamic driving force for the economy. Our analysis shows that along the optimal time path (i) the time scale of economic dynamics is mainly determined by the lifetime of pollutants, their instantaneous harmfulness and the discount rate; (ii) economic scale and structure, as well as resulting welfare, may be non-monotonic, and (iii) environmental damage may exhibit an inverted U-shape form. These results raise important questions about the optimal design of environmental policies in a multi-pollution economy. We suggest a system of dynamic Pigouvian emission taxes, each of which should be levied specifically on one particular pollutant. We show that the optimal time path of each tax level is determined by the characteristics not only of that particular pollutant but also of all other pollutants.