A production function highly concave in inputs will have a dual profit function less convex in prices. Even large variations in prices will cause little variation in input usage and output, resulting in poor profit function estimates. This is demonstrated using Monte Carlo simulation with...

In recent years there has been much discussion of the difference between Inequality and Polarization. The vast literature on inequality is held to miss out key features of distribution change, which are better described as changes in the polarization. Axioms have been proposed which capture some...

Valuation of electricity generating assets is of central importance as utilities are forced to spin-off generators with the introduction of competitive markets. A continuous-time mean reverting price path with stochastic upward jumps is proposed as an appropriate model for long-run competitive...

This paper analyzes the dynamic effects of the acreage restrictions and land diversion requirements that are characteristic of the farm subsidy programs in the United States. The subsidy payments a farmer receives are based upon historical base acreage, and it 1s sometimes optimal for a farmer...

Buy-sell arrangements for the death of a co-owner may be funded with life insurance. The mechanisms and details of buy-sell arrangements were discussed. The decision whether to use life insurance was modeled using the expected utility theorem. State dependent utility was used since a surviving...

A Box-Cox functional form was estimated from corn-nitrogen data previously used to report optimal nitrogen use from a quadratic production function. Results suggest that less nitrogen should be app1ie.d than recommended using the quadratic function, but with more nitrogen being applied if poor...

This paper analyzes serial correlation in stock returns, and informational role of volume and volatility in Polish and Slovakian stock markets. Results indicate that prices tend to overshoot to new information in the Slovakian market, while new information gets impounded into prices with a...

This paper introduces a simple method of price risk decomposition that determines the extent to which producer price risk is attributable to volatile inter-market margins, intra-day variation, intra-week (day of week) variation, or terminal market price variability. We apply the method to...