This document presents a research method to analyze the access of small and medium farmers to the supermarket market, and the effect of such access on the producers' decisions and net incomes. The method was developed for and used in a study carried out in 2004 in three Central American countries.

This paper introduces social learning into irreversible investment theory through parameter uncertainty, and shows that social learning could reduce parameter uncertainty to facilitate irreversible investment technology adoption. The theoretic model is tested by using household level data from...

Supermarkets are rapidly penetrating urban food retail in Kenya and spreading well beyond their initial tiny market niche into the food markets of lower-income groups. Having penetrated processed and staple food markets much earlier and faster than fresh foods, they have recently begun to make...

The conventional wisdom that house prices are the present value of future rents ignores the fact that rents are not discretionary as in dividends on stocks. Housing price uncertainty can affect household property investment, which in turn affects rent. By extending the theory of investment under...

China has a dual-track interest-rate system: bank deposit and lending rates are regulated while money and bond rates are market-determined. The central bank also imposes an indicative target, which may not be binding at all times, for total credit in the banking system. We develop and calibrate...

This paper aims at an important gap in the literature, which has not modeled the effect of social learning in a real option context and examined uncertainty-reduction measures through social learning. This paper addresses the gap by modeling social learning as a way of reducing parameter...

In this paper, we provide a qualitative and theoretical framework to analyze the rapid growth of shadow banking in China. An important characteristic of the system is its close connection with traditional banks, making it very bank-centric. Our theoretical model employs the concept of...

How should we think about the determination of interest rates in China after interest rate liberalisation? Would effective deposit rates, lending rates and bond yields move higher or lower? We argue that interest rates in a liberalised environment would need to be anchored by the conduct of...

The orange juice market is a weather market because of its high geographical concentration and the natural characteristics of orange trees. A few hours of a freeze in Florida is enough to cause a supply shock to the orange juice market. How do oligopolistic firms react to supply shocks do they...

This paper studies how financial markets in the US and Mainland China affected equity, money and foreign exchange markets in Hong Kong on daily basis during the current financial crisis, and how these financial linkages have changed compared with the experience in 2001. In the equity markets,...