The Working Curve and Commodity Storage under Backwardation

There remains controversy over whether the empirical curve relating intertemporal commodity price spreads and stocks, originally drawn by Holbrook Working in 1933 (i.e., the Working curve), is a valid stylized fact in commodity markets. The core of the controversy is the portion of the curve representing commodity stocks under backwardation. In this article we analyze the original data used by Working, plus more disaggregated numbers. We find that the Working curve is indeed valid. The diversity of stockholders and different stockholding motives most likely explain the empirical Working curve relationship.     

EU Reform of the Sugar Beet Regime: Implications for UK Agriculture

The purpose of this article is to discuss possible scenarios for UK sugar beet production after the reform of the sugar regime. The analysis is built on an evaluation undertaken by the University of Cambridge and The Royal Agricultural College of the impact that reforming the EU sugar regime may have on UK agriculture. The analysis focuses on the implications of reductions in quota and the support price and on the possible reactions by British Sugar, as the final outcome in terms of production will depend on the interaction between British Sugar and sugar beet farmers. The analysis indicates that British Sugar strategies such as reallocating the available quota to the more efficient producers or paying higher beet prices might mitigate the impacts of the reform. The key factor in limiting the overall impact on production is the extent that the industry can restructure and reduce its cost base. For example, following a 40 per cent reduction in the sugar beet price we estimate that if farmers could reduce their average costs by 20 per cent, about 52 per cent of UK beet production would still be viable, compared to less than 20 per cent if costs were not altered.     

Using Mind Maps to Distinguish Cultural Norms between French and United States Entrepreneurship Students

The globalization of entrepreneurship education requires instructors to understand, and adjust the curriculum for, cultural disparities. This study investigates the impact of cultural norms on the attitudes of university entrepreneurship students in France and the United States—regions with contrasting Hofstede and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor indices. It uses mind maps from students as culturally agnostic open‐ended measures of their attitudes. Two mind maps were collected from each student, one on the appeal of entrepreneurship and one on the apprehension toward entrepreneurship, for a total of 1,213 concepts that were then scored using the Moore–Bygrave staged model of entrepreneurship to measure student likes and dislikes toward innovation, the decision to launch a start‐up, new venture implementation, and venture growth. The Shannon entropy of a mind map was used as a measure of student fixation; lower entropy indicates the student is motivated or deterred by a subset of the curriculum, whereas higher entropy indicates that attitudinal components are more balanced across the curriculum. Participating students were enrolled in similar entrepreneurship courses, and exhibited attitudes with similar entropy. However, French students found the growth stage to be the most appealing and were most apprehensive about innovation, whereas U.S. students found innovation to be the most appealing stage and were most apprehensive about the growth stage, thus revealing different contextual drivers of learning and engagement with the educational materials. This research contributes to the advancement of entrepreneurship education in two ways. First, by using mind maps and differential model‐based semantic scoring, it distinguishes between motivation and deterrence, and accounts for both cognitive and affective components of attitudes toward entrepreneurship. Second, it presents a formative assessment technique with which educators can measure students' cultural disposition to the different topics of an entrepreneurship course, and can then tailor the syllabus to this disposition. This technique can potentially improve the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in multicultural settings, such as those involving educators, students, or course material from different regions and cultures.     

Accumulation pattern of the Brazilian economy in the 1990s and 2000s

This paper investigates the dynamic relationships among income distribution, debt ratio and capital accumulation in the Brazilian economy in the 1990s and 2000s. One explanation for the relatively slow growth of the Brazilian economy is the relatively low rate of investment. The paper presents an econometric model, based on Nishi, to investigate the causes of instability in investment in the period. It concludes that the Brazilian economy since the economic opening presents a debt-burdened pattern of capital accumulation.     

Environmental management and the “soft side” of organisations: Discovering the most relevant behavioural factors in green supply chains

Anchored in the resource‐based view theory, the objective of this research is to empirically analyse the behavioural factors affecting the green supply chain management (GCSM) performance in a fast‐growing emerging economy by taking an empirical data set of 101 responses from personnel in the mining sector. Behavioural factors in green supply chains are still a critical challenge—not yet a well‐explored academic subject—when the focus is on the mining industry of emerging economies like India; the lack of studies in this field could be a factor preventing the Indian mining industry becoming more green. In terms of methodology, original survey data were processed through AMOS 4.0, adopted for assessing the causal connection among the six constructs, that is, top management support, teamwork, workplace culture, resistance to change, green innovation, and green motivation. We further explore the input from the human side of GCSM by highlighting that top management support and green motivation are the most crucial behavioural factors that influence GCSM in the Indian mining sector. The study will be helpful for mining companies because it will enable them to identify the areas that require their attention for enhancing GCSM performance related to behavioural aspects.     

Labor market outcomes of granting full professional independence to nurse practitioners

Journal of Regulatory Economics - Faced with an impending shortage of physicians, the U.S. healthcare industry’s capability and capacity to meet its growing clientele’s needs rely on...     

An International Comparison of Banking Sectors: A DEA Approach

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to measure and compare the efficiency of the banking system in several countries and stages of development using the non-parametric?mathematic methodology Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Thus, we expect to broaden the range of studies about banking efficiency. Differently from most studies that use accounting data for measuring efficiency we employed market data, measuring returns and risk (calculated in different ways) in order to build a new measure of efficiency. This approach allows the comparison of different countries, which have different accounting rules and are not comparable using standard models. The main results suggest a downward trend in the average efficiency level of developed countries and a slight upward trend in the efficiency level of emerging market countries during the period. According to this study, efficiency tends to level off emerging and developed countries. It may be partially explained by the increasing globalization and integration processes that markets have been going through in the last years.