Price premiums,payment delays,and default risk: understanding developing country farmers’ decisions to market through a cooperative or a private trader

Smallholder farmers in developing countries face a competitive disadvantage in modern agricultural supply chains. Joint marketing through cooperatives is a potential tool to mitigate these disadvantages; yet cooperatives’ success in these settings is uneven at best. We develop an analytical model to study a farmer's choice of selling to a private trader who pays cash on delivery but may exercise market power or a cooperative that promises a price premium but delays payment and carries a concomitant risk of default. In the presence of impatient and risk‐averse farmers, we show that these factors can severely limit smallholder patronage of a cooperative, despite a promised price premium. We then construct and parameterize a simulation model to fit a profile of heterogeneous farmers within a prototype developing‐country village, and study the optimal decisions of farmers regarding marketing through a cooperative versus a private trader. Results suggest that modest improvements in either timeliness of payment or probability of default can induce a substantial increase in a cooperative's market share and economic viability. Extending the simulation analysis to a dynamic setting shows how implementing reasonable policies to improve a cooperative's payment timeliness and default probability can markedly improve its growth trajectory.     

农户资本禀赋对水稻生产生态效率的影响以湖北省为例

[目的]农户资本禀赋约束对水稻生产生态效率会产生重要的影响。为更全面和准确地分析资本禀赋对水稻生产生态效率的影响。[方法]文章基于长江中游湖北省农户调研数据,利用生命周期评价方法、超效率SBM模型、熵值法、Tobit和OLS回归等多种模型和方法,在理论分析基础上从多个角度就资本禀赋对水稻生产生态效率的影响进行研究。[结果]（1）农户资本禀赋存在较大差异,各类别资本禀赋排序为人力资本（0.37）>社会资本（0.17）>金融资本（0.16）>物质资本（0.14）>自然资本（0.10）。强资本型的农户比例在综合资本禀赋和分类别资本禀赋上均少于弱资本型的农户比例。（2）单季水稻系统生命周期环境影响综合指数为2.10,水稻生产生态效率为0.64。（3）农户综合资本禀赋提升有利于提升水稻生产生态效率。综合资本禀赋对水稻生产生态效率的提升效应主要得益于物质资本、社会资本和金融资本的正向影响。[结论]从物质资本、社会资本、金融资本等方面加强农户资本禀赋积累,以促进水稻生产方式绿色转型。     

Toward the system theory of dependence: Further general theoretical remarks

This paper forms another part of a more extensive study inspired by the authors' aims to contribute to the elaboration of the social systems theory of dependence and to better understand the behavior of the global system of human beings and of its subsystems. The theory of dependence, by elaborating an abstract theoretical model of the dependence space, aims at a better understanding of social change (or resistance to change) on the micro, medium and macro-levels of the social systems. In this paper some features of a crude model have been presented at a high level of abstraction. A minimum set of concepts, such as dependence relation, dependence coupling, dependence boundary, dependence capacity, entropy of behavior, systems need relations and possibilities, etc., have been defined and formalized. Some propositions have been formulated. We hope that, in spite of the high level of abstraction and of an insufficient amount of data supporting our propositions which are based mainly on the general systems taxonomy and on the hypothetical-deductive method, the conclusions will have some heuristic value for further inquiries into the theory of modelling the guidance systems of social processes.     

Information revelation in auctions

Auction theory has emphasized the importance of private information to the profits of bidders. However, the theory has failed to consider to what extent initially private information will remain private. We show that in a variety of contexts bidders will reveal their information, even if this information revelation is (ex ante) detrimental to them. Similarly, a seller may reveal her information although this revelation lowers revenues. We also show that bidders may be harmed by private information, even in contexts where more information has traditionally been presumed to be beneficial.     

Enhancement of value investing strategies based on financial statement variables: the German evidence

This paper examines the added-value of combining traditional valuation ratios with each other as well as with some financial statement variables in the German stock markets during the 2000–2015 period. The results show that combination pays off and, moreover, that the benefits of combination are greater in Germany than in most other developed stock markets. Particularly, we find strong evidence of the added-value of using Piotroski’s F-score as a supplementary selection criterion for value stocks as well as for low-accrual stocks. Our results show further that the F-score also boosts the efficacy of other valuation ratios besides the book-to-price ratio. In addition, the inclusion of F-score besides a relative value measure tends to increase the average market equity of portfolio firms. The decomposition of the full-sample-period performance into separate bull- and bear-period performance shows clearly that the better performance of F-score-boosted portfolios is mostly attributable to their outperformance during bearish periods, even though on average, they also generate higher bull-period returns than the comparable value portfolios formed without F-score. The use of F-score as a supplementary criterion also increases the proportion of stocks that earn above-market-average returns during the subsequent holding period. For the first time in the financial literature, we also document a strong relationship between high F-score stocks and momentum stocks.     

Participation in research and development at the Tshikonelo agricultural project,Northern province

This article takes to task certain assumptions about participation in research and development, and criticises them for being decontextualised and ethnographically uninformed. Results of social scientific research at an existing agricultural project in the Northern Province of South Africa are brought to bear on the theory and assumptions of participatory research and development. The study starts with a theoretical account of participatory research. The point is made that there is not necessarily any connection between participatory research and participatory development. It is concluded from the subsequent case study that participation in research and development could be negatively influenced by local power dynamics, by institutional reluctance to experiment with participation, and by policy decisions and circumstances that do not lend themselves to social change. The significance of participation cannot be deduced in isolation from its context of implementation. It is concluded that participation by itself would not necessarily lead to these changes.     

Économie sociale et économie publique: nouvelles formes de coopération à l'ère de la mondialisation

En choisissant le thème du congrès CIRIEC/IFIG 2000 à Montréal, "Économie sociale et économie publique: nouvelles formes de coopération à l'ère de la mondialisation", les instances du CIRIEC international ont voulu inscrire les évolutions récentes des relations entre entreprises publiques et d'économie sociale dans un contexte international en pleine mutation, à l'ère de la mondialisation.     

On the realized volatility of the ECX CO2 emissions 2008 futures contract: distribution, dynamics and forecasting

This article documents the conditional and unconditional distributions of the realized volatility for the 2008 futures contract in the European climate exchange (ECX), which is valid under the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS). Realized volatility measures from naive, kernel-based and subsampling estimators are used to obtain inferences about the distributional and dynamic properties of the ECX emissions futures volatility. The distribution of the daily realized volatility in logarithmic form is shown to be close to normal. The mixture-of-normals hypothesis is strongly rejected, as the returns standardized using daily measures of volatility clearly departs from normality. A simplified HAR-RV model (Corsi in J Financ Econ 7:174–196, 2009) with only a weekly component, which reproduces long memory properties of the series, is then used to model the volatility dynamics. Finally, the predictive accuracy of the HAR-RV model is tested against GARCH specifications using one-step-ahead forecasts, which confirms the HAR-RV superior ability.     

Automatic Fiscal Stabilisers: What They Are and What They Do

The global financial and economic crisis has revived the debate in the academic literature and in policy circles about the size and effectiveness of automatic fiscal stabilisers. Especially in the euro area where monetary policy is centralised and discretionary fiscal policy making is constrained by the EU fiscal rules, knowing the size and the effectiveness of automatic stabilisers is crucial. While automatic stabilisers are a fairly established concept in the fiscal policy literature, there is still no consensus about their actual nature and their effectiveness. This paper shows that differences in opinion mirror a deeper disagreement over how the budget would look like without automatic stabilisers. This issue is addressed by defining two types of counterfactual budgets giving rise to two different interpretations about the nature of automatic stabilisation. Simulations with a structural model confirm that the degree of smoothing is conditional on how the counterfactual budget, i.e. the budget without automatic stabilisers, is defined.     

Competitive advertising within store flyers: A win–win strategy?

This study investigates the effect of competitive advertising within store flyers on both manufacturers and retailers. Prior research implies that competitive advertising may be detrimental for manufacturers and beneficial for retailers. Findings from an intersubject experiment that uses various familiar and unfamiliar competing brands confirm that store flyers’ competitive advertising improves consumers’ perceptions of the variety of the retailer’s assortment, which has a positive impact on intentions to visit the store and buy. However, increasing the number of competing brands does not harm manufacturers; rather, it enhances recognition of brands, especially for well-known brands. This article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings for the design of store flyers.