How do institutional market players matter in farmland pricing?

In this paper we analyse how institutional sellers within the privatisation process shape price formation in agricultural land markets by taking the German reunification as an example. These institutions sell the formerly state owned land within first-price sealed bid auctions, publish calls and obtained prices, and are hypothesised to exploit their market power. Based on the conceptual framework of hedonic pricing models, we use a spatio-temporal modelling approach to empirically quantify these impacts. We thereby control for land productivity characteristics, potential buyers and whether farmers purchase the land. We find that privatisation agencies sell at significantly higher prices, while one agency sells at lower prices to farmers.     

Evolving splines and seasonal unit roots in weekly agricultural prices

The univariate statistical properties of agricultural price series need to be examined as a first step in the analysis of price transmission mechanisms. However, in the case of weekly price series, increasingly available, the testing procedures usually applied in this step are not suitable to deal with evolving seasonal effects. In this study, a method of testing for seasonal unit roots in weekly series of agricultural prices is described. When the deterministic seasonal component does not remain constant over time, the restricted evolving spline model (RESM) is shown to be a useful parametric formulation to capture the deterministic seasonal pattern. Therefore, the RESM model should be included as a deterministic component in auxiliary regression for unit root tests at seasonal frequencies. This proposal is applied to three weekly series of Canary Islands banana prices. From the standard seasonal unit root tests, the null hypothesis is failed to be rejected at the 5% or 10% significance level at some seasonal frequencies for each one of the series. Once critical values are obtained by simulation exercises when the RESM model is included, the hypotheses of unit root are rejected at each one of the seasonal frequencies for all of the three series.     

Aggregation and the Nature of Price Expectations

Market liquidity requires differences of opinion among traders, but market behavior is often modeled using just one representative agent. This paper aggregates trading activity across many traders, at least one of which has rational expectations. Equilibrium price expectations depend on individual risk preferences and the expectations of all traders. Results indicate that positive feedback traders comprise a statistically significant minority of traders that has grown with the prevalence of commodity pools.     

试析人类耗用能源对气候变暖的贡献

在对地球气候变暖原因的探讨中,人们较注意“温室气体”的贡献,但与“温室气体”排放几乎同时进行的巨额热量的释放也是不应 忽视的;由205个国家和地区在1年内消耗的商品能源量数据。计算出每年释放的热量相当于地球接受30分钟的太阳辐射量,在绝热情况下可使全球陆地2m厚的表层、全球海洋2m深的水体和全球大气温度提高0.06℃;对上述结果进行了讨论。     

电子商务下的商品流通

技术领域的每一次大的变革都实现了流通行业的脱胎换骨,迅速提高了流通效率,流通效率的提高反过来对社会经济又产生了巨大的促进作用。从电报、电话到轮船、铁路,数次工业革命概莫如此。电子商务的发展,更具革命性地推动着传统流通行业的变化,包括交易方式、流通基本特征、流通组织、商业地位与业态、物流、信息流、流通规则等,形成电子商务下的流通方式。     

House Prices,Wealth and Consumption: New Evidence from Australia and Canada

Over the past two decades, a number of countries have experienced appreciation in house prices at the same time that aggregate consumption has increased. This paper tests alternative hypotheses for this phenomenon by using repeated household surveys from Australia and Canada to identify the transmission mechanism that links consumption and household wealth. The empirical analysis suggests that neither a direct wealth effect nor a common causal factor likely accounts for the observed correlation between wealth and consumption in these two countries. Rather, indirect factors such as collateral effects arising from relaxation of credit constraints are a more likely explanation.     

ICP 2005 Construction Prices: Are They Underestimated in Developing Countries?

Construction prices are lower in developing countries in ICP 2005, which has raised these countries' capital/output ratio in Penn World Tables 7 and 8 and affected growth analyses. We estimate the Colombia/U.S. price ratio for office and apartment buildings in 2005 as a test of the validity of the ICP 2005 methodology for estimating these prices. Our estimate of the Colombia/U.S. price ratio is almost twice the ICP 2005 estimate. We confirm the validity of our results by estimating the cost of constructing office and apartment buildings using 2005 prices for construction materials, equipment, and labor in both countries.