Ranking farms with a composite indicator of sustainability

The assessment of sustainability at farm level has been growing in popularity over the last few years. This article contributes to this line of research by building up composite indicators for different facets—social, economic, environmental, and global—of farm sustainability using a methodological approach that combines data envelopment analysis (DEA) and multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods, and assigns common weights to each individual sustainability indicator. This approach is applied to a database of 163 farms located in the Campos County, a region belonging to the dry lands of the Spanish Northern Plateau, using 12 individual indicators of sustainability. Our findings show that both economic and environmental composite sustainability indicators are positively correlated, but that this is not the case for the social indicator. We also check the influence of a set of variables on farm sustainability using bootstrapping statistical techniques, and showing that increasing farm size, membership in agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ medium and upper agricultural‐specific technical education, all exert a significant positive influence on sustainability. These results provide clues for policy makers that intend to design sustainability‐increasing structural agricultural policies.     

Determination of the international maize price: What is the growing role of Brazil and Ukraine?

This paper examines the relationships among maize prices for four countries to determine if newly emerging exporters, Brazil and Ukraine, influence the international price of maize. Our work focuses on each market's participation in the price discovery process rather than trying to determine a price leader. We find that the United States plays the largest role in price discovery, followed by Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine. We also search for export thresholds and find that Ukraine's contribution to price discovery rises slightly when an export threshold of 2.3 million tons is reached. No export thresholds were found for Brazil. Export thresholds for Argentina were found but only have a minor impact on price relationships. We also found that price relationships vary considerably across seasons of the year.     

Implications of the Philadelphia Beverage Tax on Sales and Beverage Substitution for a Major Grocery Retailer Chain

To understand whether substitution effects occurred for a major national grocery retailer after the implementation of a beverage tax in Philadelphia, the authors used November 2015/2016 and February 2016/2017 data from a major national grocery retailer with stores alongside the borders of Philadelphia County (within 5 miles of each side). A difference in difference was conducted, a statistical technique that allows comparison among groups in an observational data setting, to understand whether the introduction of a beverage tax on January 1, 2017 would lead consumers to shift their buying habits to healthier options. Results are consistent with the notion that the implementation of a beverage tax on sweetened beverages (SBs: both sugar and artificially sweetened) did not generally lead consumers of that retailer to switch purchases to non-sweetened beverages. In contrast, data suggest that consumer purchasing of SBs and general sales increased significantly outside of Philadelphia County at that retailer. A potential explanation is that, some consumers continued buying SBs but traveled outside of Philadelphia County not just to buy the SBs but also for other grocery as well.     

Auditor independence, executive pay and firm performance

This paper investigates whether compensation committees actively intervene to adjust accounting performance‐based incentive schemes for the real, or perceived, reduced earnings credibility signalled by the purchase of non‐audit services. Using a nonlinear, two‐stage least‐squares method that accounts for the simultaneity of executive pay, firm performance and non‐audit fees, we find a significant negative relationship between non‐audit fees and the sensitivity of chief executive officer (CEO) pay to firm performance. Point estimates suggest that the reduced weight applied to accounting performance lowers the incentive component of executive pay between roughly 5 and 8 per cent for the CEO of the ‘average firm’.     

Changing compensation for top corporate executives

Salaries of a quarter of a million dollars or more are not rare in this country. Although-such salaries are criticized from many directions, this level of pay is justifiable when executives' functions are considered, and the level is bound to increase in the period ahead.     

Microelectronics,industry, and the third world

As microelectronics revolutionises production in the developed countries, the traditional export successes of the Third world (eg garments and electronics) are threatened. That trade, which has grown rapidly in the past decade, relies heavily on the comparative advantage of low-wage high-skill labour. People are flexible—they can learn new skills and adapt to new fashions. But microprocessors are eroding that advantage. The newly industrialised countries, in particular, may be able to respond by competing in a wider range of exports. However, there is an urgent need for government intervention to ensure that the less developed countries acquire the software capabilities needed to make full use of the new technology.     

Money and economic activity revisited

Recent literature has concluded that money no longer plays a fundamental role in determining US economic activity, especially when post-1982 data are included in the analysis. We re-examine the issue using annual and quarterly data sets ranging back to the Civil War. Cointegration tests show that an equilibrium relationship holds between money and income in all data samples of 35 years or longer, but frequently fails to hold for many shorter samples. However, when the normal monetary lags are explicitly imposed, a cointegrating relationship is frequently captured, even in quite short samples. Examining the issue in a standard five-variable VAR model, we find that money is the most important variable in explaining real output for the full 1874–1993 as well as 1952–1993 periods, even allowing for interest rate effects. Finally, using monthly data over the troublesome 1983–1994 sample, we show that when appropriate adjustments are made to capture recent structural changes, such as the growing importance of the international economy on US output, money still Granger-causes economic activity.