The 1996 Farm Bill (FAIR) dramatically changed agricultural policy for producers of many commodities. A series of 7 annual decoupled payments replaced the deficiency-payment program. Option-pricing techniques are used to determine whether program benefits to corn producers are smaller or larger...

In the presence of uncertainty and irreversibility, dynamic decision problems should not be solved using expected net present value analysis. The right to delay a decision can be valuable. We show that the value of this right equals Arrow and Fishers (1974) quasi-option value. In a discrete...

The influence of socioeconomic variables on nutrient intake is studied using nonparametric procedures that admit estimation of multivariate functions. The analysis indicates a nonlinear relation between intake, age, education, and income. Specifically, intake rises with income reaching an...

The hypothesis that asset returns are normally distributed has been widely rejected. The literature has shown that empirical asset returns are highly skewed and leptokurtic. The affine jump-diffusion (AJD) model improves upon the normal specification by adding a jump component to the price...

Purpose – A large body of empirical literature has identified the key drivers of corporate cash holdings. The extant literature posits that the existence of real options significantly influences a firm's demand for liquidity. The literature, however, has relied on indirect proxies to assess...

This paper extends the affine class of term structure models to describe the joint dynamics of exchange rates and interest rates. In particular, the issue of how to reconcile the low volatility of interest rates with the high volatility of exchange rates is addressed. The incomplete market...

Conventional measures of gross domestic product (GDP) fail to account for the effect of economic activity on the environment. Integrated environmental-economic (or 'green') GDP is calculated using a data-envelopment-analysis (DEA) framework. For this purpose a dynamic cross-country technology is...

Higher union density (the percentage of employees in an area who belong to unions) is known to raise the wages of union members. We find that in the supermarket industry, higher density locally also leads to higher wages for non-union members. Despite this, workers who are not in unions lose...