Pre-Harvest Price Expectations for Corn: The Information Content of USDA Reports and New Crop Futures

This article examines the puzzle of why futures prices continue to react to USDA crop reports despite the fact that reports appear to be no longer "newsworthy," that is, provide no better production estimates than private forecasts. The information value of reports is measured in terms of their influence on rational agents' harvest-time corn price expectations, which are uncovered using a Hamilton-type modeling approach. Results show that reports are still "newsworthy," as they would contribute to agents' price expectations if released a day early. Thus futures price reactions, which closely reflect price expectations, are rational and consistent with efficient markets hypothesis.     

Long-Term Performance Following Rights Issues and Open Offers in the UK

Abstract:  This study finds evidence of significant long-term underperformance following rights issues made during 1986-95 in the UK. The findings are resilient to a number of methodological controls. In contrast, our results for a smaller sample of open offers made during 1991-95 show strong positive performance over a 5-year post-issue period, implying that firms making open offers had better growth prospects than firms making rights issues. During 1986-90, a period when open offers were rarely used, firms appeared to be making rights issues to exploit overvaluation. However, this was not evident for rights issues made during 1991-95, a period when open offers were more commonly used.     

Dividend Imputation and Shareholder Wealth: The Case of New Zealand

On April 1, 1988, New Zealand stopped the double taxation of dividends by implementing a full dividend imputation program. Because many believed that the tax advantage of debt had led to more highly leveraged firms subject to greater financial risk than was socially optimal, it was hoped the removal of incentives to finance with debt would result in a more efficient allocation of capital. The empirical results suggest that the shareholder wealth gain from dividend imputation was more than offset in firms with large debt levels. Moreover, an examination of debt ratios indicates debt levels declined in the post–imputation period.     

E-Consulting in Virtual Negotiations

In the e-world where many of us live and work, virtual work arrangements will become increasingly commonplace. This paper reports on an exploratory study into the way in which consultants can ply their trade virtually with clients whom they never meet. US-located e-consultants provided advice to Hong Kong-located web site developers on the interface and content aspects of a website that was being developed for an international audience. Extensive analyses of the communication between the consultants and developers is undertaken, in parallel with an analysis of survey data obtained from the two sets of stakeholders. Lessons are drawn for future research and practice.     

The Robustness of the APT to Alternative Estimators

We test the robustness of the APT to two alternative estimation procedures: the Fama and MacBeth (1973) two-step methodology; and the one-step procedure due to Burmeister and McElroy (1988). We find that the APT is indeed sensitive to the chosen estimator and assumptions about the factor structure of stock returns. We believe that our findings have implications for the estimation of asset pricing models in general.     

SOME ANALYTICS OF WHY CONDITIONAL IRRs CAN CONTAIN GROWTH RATE RELATED MEASUREMENT ERROR

This paper investigates the consequences of incorrectly modelling the investment outflow/benefit inflow relationship on estimates of the internal rate of return (IRR) prepared by using cash recovery rates (CRRs). The main result of this paper is that CRR-based estimates of the IRR will contain such bias if and only if either the duration of the assumed shape of the investment outflow/benefit inflow relationship is less than the duration of the true investment outflow/benefit inflow relationship for all rates of interest or the duration of the assumed shape of the investment outflowlbenefit inflow relationship is greater than the duration of the true investment outflowlbenefit inflow relationship for all rates of interest. This result is then applied to the case where both the true and the assumed shape of the investment outflow/benefit inflow relationships have benefit inflows that change exponentially over time. It is shown that if the exponential rate of change is mis-specified the resulting CRR-based estimate of the IRR will contain systematic bias monotonically related to the rate of growth.     

Economic analysis of community‐based wildlife utilisation initiatives in Botswana

Financial and economic cost‐benefit models were applied to determine the worth of several planned community‐based, wildlife utilisation initiatives in Botswana, and to identify policy guidelines. Projects planned to incorporate small‐scale wildlife cropping. Rentals from safari‐hunting or wildlife‐viewing activities were found to have inherent viability, both financially and economically, particularly in the north of the country, where tourism is greatest. However, success is dependent on both good management and high densities of wildlife. In the Kalahari, game at low densities (more than 100 hectares per large stock unit) cannot be cropped profitably by communities and investments in game protection will result in economic gain. At higher game densities (between 100 and about 25 hectares per large stock unit), positive financial returns are possible with community‐based cropping but two considerations are important. First, investment in protection continues to pay economically and, second, cropping at close to maximum sustainable intensity is most profitable economically. Selective protection aimed at restoring proportions of drought‐sensitive game species also appears economically rewarding.     

Adjustment, Stabilisation and the Analysis of the Employment Structure in Turkey: An Input- Output Approach

The aim of the paper is to examine the effects on employment of the large-scale structural adjustment programme undertaken by Turkey from the early 1980s onwards. In this respect, we particularly analyse how appropriate the choices of factor intensity after structural adjustment programme have been in the domestic production in comparison with the availability of domestic factor endowment. Our findings show that foreign trade in intermediate goods creates extra use of domestic labour, which can be considered as the labour cost of importing intermediate goods. This is the case in the majority of industries in the pre- and post-liberalisation period in Turkey. However, the capacity of using extra labour as a result of importing intermediate goods appeared to have decreased in the post-liberalisation period.