the adoption of reduced tillage the role of human capital and other variables this paper presents a model of adoption behavior and explains differences econometrically in farmers decisions to adopt reduced tillage practices and in the efficiency of farmers adoption decisions the empirical results obtained from microdata show that the probability of adopting reduced tillage in corn enterprises differs widely across farms and depends on soil characteristics cropping systems and size of farming operation the results also show that farmers schooling enhances the efficiency of the adoption decision

adoption of new tobacco varieties in greece impacts of empirical findings on policy design abstract greece is a major international tobacco producer flue cured tobacco varieties constituted the major alternative crop to greek farmers growing certain oriental tobacco varieties diffusion of flue cured tobacco was rapid due to its high yields and the depressed market for certain oriental tobacco varieties currently the common organisation of the tobacco market is undergoing substantial changes and the farmers response will be a vital factor of success a portfolio selection model reveals that the major factors influencing the adoption decision of tobacco growers are the size of the farm measured in annual work units the farm s proximity to urban centres the farm s diversification and the farmer s age the number of contacts with institutions is surprisingly inversely related to adoption future tobacco policies impinging on factors influencing decisions to adopt new varieties or production practices may be more cost effective

common agency with rational expectations theory and application to a monetary union we extend the theory of common agency to the situation where the principals payoffs are affected by their ex ante expectations of the agent s ex post choice we show how the usual truthful schedules must be modified to account for the rational expectations constraint we apply the model to a monetary union where member governments influence the policy of the common central bank using incentive contracts we examine how the outcomes depend on different delegated objectives of the bank and find that some often advocated rules create an excessive deflationary bias

risk uncertainty and learning in adoption of a crop innovation risk and uncertainty have often been suggested as causes of poor adoption of rural innovations but empirical evidence has been scarce this study focuses on a new crop type chickpeas in western australia to gather such evidence the empirical models developed are based on a theoretical framework that conceptualizes adoption as a dynamic decision process involving information acquisition and learning by doing by growers who vary in their managerial abilities risk preferences and their perceptions of the profitability and riskiness of the innovation learning encompasses improvements in skill as well as reductions in uncertainty an annual face to face survey of over 100 farmers was conducted over 3 years eliciting the farmers risk attitudes and their subjective distributions of yields and prices two limited dependent variable models tobit and probit are used to estimate the empirical model there is a high degree of goodness of fit for both models the study provides strong empirical support for the primarily economic character of the adoption decision and highlight the importance of economic risk in the process the two risk related factors with greatest impact on the adoption decision were risk aversion and relative riskiness of the innovation risk aversion tended to reduce adoption and to do so to a greater extent as relative riskiness and scale increased results also reveal the key role that trialing of the innovation plays in adoption

monetary cohabitation in europe how can monetary policy in stage iii of european monetary union be coordinated between the ins and the outs this paper compares alternative institutional mechanisms and concludes that a generalized system of inflation targets at the european level has several merits it strengthens domestic credibility of monetary policy it rules out deliberate attempts to gain competitiveness through devaluations it forces monetary policy to respond automatically to various macroeconomic shocks which is stabilizing for the real exchange rate and it distributes these shocks symmetrically across countries on the basis of a simple theoretical model of policy coordination the paper shows that a system of inflation targets approximates an optimal policy of international cooperation preliminary empirical evidence supports these theoretical results this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the role of farmers behavioral attitudes and heterogeneity in futures contracts usage the relationship between farmers behavioral attitudes and use of futures contracts is examined taking into account non directly observable variables and the heterogeneity of farmers the relationships are tested on a stratified data sample of 440 farmers cluster analysis and covariance structure equation models are used to validate the relationships farmers are found not to be homogenous regarding the factors influencing their use of futures heterogeneity at the segment level masked important effects at the aggregate level notably risk attitude furthermore several psychological constructs for farmers related to market orientation risk exposure market performance and entrepreneurial behavior play important roles in their use of futures contracts

farming efficiency and the determinants of multiple job holding by farm operators the extent to which farm families engage inoff farm employment activities is a topic ofcentralimportancetounderstandingthe nan cial well being of farm households the degreeof nancial stress experienced by u s farmfamilies is always a concern to policy makers yet policyconsiderationsoftenignorethesub stantial involvement of most farm householdsin nonfarm labor markets it has been shownthat whentheentirefarmhouseholdisconsid ered the average u s farm household hasa higher total income and much greater assetholdings than is the case for nonfarm house holds see e g goodwin mishra et al pre sented data for 2000 suggesting that when allfarms are considered 92 of total householdincomecamefromnonfarmsources ofcourse such gures depend on how one chooses to de neafarm whenoneconsiderslargeandverylarge commercial farms the share of farm in come in total household income ranges from50 to 75

intertemporal cost allocation and managerial investment incentives a theory explaining the use of economic value added as a performance measure this paper provides a formal analysis of how managerial investment incentives are affected by alternative allocation rules when managerial compensation is based on accounting measures of income that include allocations for investment expenditures the main result is that there exists a unique allocation rule that always induces the manager to choose the efficient investment level the income measure created by this allocation rule is usually referred to as residual income or economic value added

human capital producer education programs and the adoption of forward pricing methods using a sample of 509 kansas producers we evaluate factors affecting adoption of forward pricing methods we focus on producers human capital accumulation and its effect on adoption of forward pricing techniques probit models are employed to evaluate producers participation in educational programs and their forward pricing adoption decisions tobit models are employed to evaluate individual levels of adoption of these techniques in the marketing of wheat corn grain sorghum soybeans and cattle

on the value relevance of asymmetric financial reporting policies this paper considers an overlapping generations model where investors trade in a firm s stock investment risk is partly determined by the volatility of the stock price at which current investors can sell their shares to the next generation of investors it is shown that asymmetric reporting of good and bad news is value relevant as it affects the allocation of risk among future generations of shareholders

estimating the demand for a new technology bt cotton and insecticide policies this article examines the potential demand for bt cotton in the southeast from information gathered in the first year of commercialization we combine revealed preference rp data on adoption of bt cotton varieties with stated preference sp data on willingness to adopt to estimate demand using a double bounded maximum likelihood procedure using estimated demand equations we simulate the costs of reducing conventional insecticide applications through subsidization of bt cotton results indicate that reducing cotton insecticide applications by 40 in the southeast would require a 21 acre subsidy with total annual program costs between 53 million and 60 million

contracting theory and accounting abstract this paper reviews agency theory and its application to accounting issues i discuss the formulation of models of incentive problems caused by moral hazard and adverse selection problems i review theoretical research on the role of performance measures in compensation contracts and i compare how information is aggregated for compensation purposes versus valuation purposes i also review the literature on communication including models where the revelation principle does not apply so that nontruthful reporting and earnings management can take place the paper also discusses capital allocation within firms including transfer pricing and cost allocation problems

market exit through divestment the effect of accounting bias on competition we analyze the effect of accounting bias on the competition and market structure of an industry in our model firms interim accounting reports on investment projects may contain bias introduced by the mandatory accounting system we find that this bias strictly decreases firms profits when investors do not have an abandonment option but different results emerge when we allow the investors to divest in the interim specifically a conservative accounting regime may increase the likelihood of projects being discontinued inducing some firms to exit from the product market and leaving rivals to capture their market share a conservative regime can thus soften market competition and result in ex ante higher investment payoff higher consumer surplus and higher total social welfare since industries often have common reporting standards we also identify the degrees of industry wide accounting bias that maximize the expected investor payoffs finally we allow for investors to coordinate their divestment

accounting conservatism and managerial incentives there are two sources of agency costs under moral hazard 1 distortions in incentive contracts and 2 implementation of suboptimal decisions in the accounting literature the relation between conservative accounting and agency costs of type 1 has received considerable attention cf watts 2002 however little appears to be known about the effects of accounting conservatism on agency costs of type 2 or trade offs between agency costs of types 1 and 2 the purpose of this study is to examine this void in a principal agent setting in which the principal motivates the agent to expend effort using accounting earnings this study shows that accounting earnings become more useful for reducing agency costs of type 2 when measured conservatively than when measured aggressively combined with the result in kwon et al 2001 that agency costs of type 1 decrease with accounting conservatism this analysis suggests that conservative accounting enhances the incentive value of accounting signals with

revenue insurance purchase decisions of farmers the objective of this study is to evaluate farm household and financial characteristics of cash grain farmers decisions of whether to purchase revenue insurance using farm level data these characteristics were identified by estimating a logit model of revenue insurance purchase decisions by farm operators results indicate that farm operators with the ability to self insure through accumulation of sufficient wealth reserves measured in terms of the ratio of debts to assets operators with off farm income and participation in production and marketing contracts are more likely to pursue these strategies as a substitute for federal revenue insurance programmes further study finds that older and wealthy cash grain farmers are less likely to buy revenue insurance

delegation in international monetary policy games abstract in this paper we show that delegation of monetary policy to an independent and more conservative central banker is an optimal policy in a multi country framework with monetary spillovers among countries even in the absence of time inconsistency credibility issues we also study the welfare implications of delegating monetary policy and extend our analysis to the case of coordination of monetary policies

financing and investment efficiency information quality and accounting biases in this paper we investigate the effect of accounting biases on firms financing decisions and the role of accounting biases in endogenous information quality we show that in industries with generally low profit prospects a downward biased accounting system performs better than a neutral accounting system and a more downward bias helps mitigate both investment and financing inefficiency whereas for industries with generally high profit prospects an upward biased accounting system is better than a neutral accounting system and a more upward bias helps improve financing efficiency in addition we find that a more downward biased accounting system motivates good firms to exert more effort to improve the information quality which improves overall efficiency this paper was accepted by mary barth accounting

a measurement approach to conservatism and earnings management this paper formalizes a two step representation of accounting measurement and uses it to formalize a general rationale for conservatism as a measurement principle a transaction s economic substance manifests itself in characteristics of the transaction and an accounting rule is a mapping from transaction characteristics to an accounting report managers who have stakes in the accounting report are able to influence transaction characteristics such earnings management is ex post rational for managers but ex ante inefficient to safeguard against such ex post opportunism the optimal ex ante accounting rule is conservative in the sense that it requires more verification of the transaction characteristics favorable to managers thus this rationale for conservatism is as general as the managers ability and incentive to inflate transaction characteristics by opening the black box of accounting measurement the two step representation also formalizes some classic accounting concepts such as relevance reliability verifiability verification and accounting motivated transactions

measuring the effect of risk attitude on marketing behavior despite extensive study researchers continue to search for consistent and reliable measures of risk preferences to explain market behavior we find that a measure combining experiments rooted in expected utility theory and measures derived from surveys explains spot and contractual sales but does not exhibit substantially greater explanatory power than its underlying components survey based measures are generally more significant indicators of marketing choices but experimental measures reveal how risk attitudes vary over a range of probable outcomes which is important in light of increased commodity price volatility given recently identified limitations on the applicability of expected utility theory we suggest that researchers include survey methods to obtain low cost supplemental measures

unconventional adjustment strategies for rural households in the less developed areas in greece abstract international competition in agricultural production is intensifying following the implementation of the 1993 accord of the general agreement on tariffs and trade the production of conventional farm products in surplus is being discouraged by means of indirect economic disincentives the common agricultural policy has already adjusted to unprotected national markets within the european union and greater market orientation is being achieved mainly through price reductions farmers in the less developed areas in greece where agricultural activity is still the main source of income and employment have been responding to policy reforms by seeking part time employment and income in non farm enterprises the adoption of alternative unconventional farm enterprises that use farm resources in an innovative and quantitatively different way does have the potential for bringing in a new source of income to farm business for the purpose of this research three adjustment strategies were recognised the conventional no change pathway is based on traditional region specific products production methods and services the adoption of the new crop pathway refers to the redeployment of resources into new agricultural products whereas farms on the market integration pathway redeploy resources into new marketing services and agricultural product processing on the farm the new crop and the market integration pathways are identified as unconventional adjustment strategies results derived from multinomial logit analysis highlight the major constraints and opportunities associated with the adoption of new crops and market integration practices farmers who have adopted unconventional practices are influenced by factors external to the farm such as contacts with institutions and have a high probability of having higher debts these farmers are likely to depend heavily on seasonal labour and rented land the fact that market integration activities are associated with smaller farms in conjunction with off farm work signifies the importance of establishing an integrated rural development policy approach public policy involvement in enhancing dissemination of information concerning unconventional enterprises is emphasised

observable contracts strategic delegation and cooperation the role of commitments in noncooperative games is well acknowledged and documented one way to achieve commitments is by letting delegates represent the players of a game in this paper the authors study a delegation game in which the players can use agents strategically to play on their behalf and the contracts they sign with them are common knowledge they show that in such cases every pareto optimal outcome of the game can become the unique subgame perfect nash equilibrium of the delegation game the authors demonstrate this result by discussing the cournot type duopolistic game copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

two step econometric estimation of farm characteristics affecting marketing contract decisions we examine how farm characteristics affect marketing contract decisions we relax the restrictive assumptions of tobit poisson and multinomial logit models and consider the quantity frequency and contract type decisions conditional on rather than jointly with the contract adoption decision in contrast to earlier studies on marketing contract decisions we estimate a two step econometric model using agricultural resource management study data and find that farm characteristics affecting decisions to adopt marketing contracts differ from those affecting decisions regarding quantity frequency and contract type

style and performance of agricultural market advisory services this article develops measures of marketing style for advisory programs in corn and soybeans and estimates the relationship between style characteristics and pricing performance style is measured by the intensity of futures and options use degree of activeness in marketing and seasonality of sales the data set consists of advisory programs tracked by the agmas project at the university of illinois between 1995 and 2004 results indicate that active programs making large bets on price movements obtain a higher average price than more conservative programs this is consistent with active advisors possessing superior information and or analytical skills rather than being overconfident however estimates of the relationship between pricing performance and activeness are sensitive to the inclusion of a single high performing program

welfare and macroeconomic interdependence we develop a baseline model of monetary and fiscal transmission in interdependent economies the welfare effects of expansionary policies are related to monopolistic supply in production and monopoly power of a country in trade an unanticipated exchange rate depreciation can be beggar thyself rather than beggar thy neighbor as gains in domestic output are offset by deteriorating terms of trade smaller and more open economies are more prone to suffer from inflationary shocks larger economies benefit from moderate demand led expansions but may be worse off if policy makers attempt to close the output gap fiscal shocks are generally beggar thy neighbor in the long run in the short run they raise domestic demand at given terms of trade thus reducing the welfare benefits from monetary expansions analytical tractability makes our model uniquely suitable as a starting point to approach the recent new open economy macroeconomic literature

designing targeting rules for international monetary policy cooperation this study analyzes a two country dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities monopolistic competition and producer currency pricing a quadratic approximation to the utility of the consumers is derived and assumed as the policy objective function of the policymakers it is shown that only under special conditions there are no gains from cooperation and moreover that the paths of the exchange rate and prices in the constrained efficient solution depend on the kind of disturbance that affects the economy it might be the case either for fixed or floating exchange rates despite this result simple targeting rules that involve only targets for the growth of output and for both domestic gdp and cpi inflation rates can replicate the cooperative allocation

conservative accounting and equity valuation abstract this paper examines how conservative accounting affects the relation between accounting data and firm value the analysis shows that conservative accounting can be characterized equivalently in terms of book value earnings or book rate of return furthermore capitalized earnings generally provide a less biased estimate of equity value than book value does in addition firm growth affects the way earnings and book value are combined in valuation a weighted average of book value and capitalized earnings with the weight on earnings being an increasing and convex function of growth yields an asymptotically unbiased estimate of equity value when growth is positive the weight on book value is negative

optimal monetary policy cooperation through state independent contracts with targets abstract simple state independent monetary institutions are shown to secure optimal cooperative policies in a stochastic linear quadratic two country world with international policy spill overs and national credibility problems institutions characterize delegation to independent central bankers facing quadratic performance related contracts punishing or rewarding deviations from primary and intermediate policy targets

the adoption of interrelated innovations a human capital approach a hstract this paper develops a model of the decision to adopt interrelated innovations emphasizing the role of innovative ability and a measure of the economic incentive to be informed about innovations education experience and the availability of information are hypothesized to be measurable dimensions of innovative ability the results from fitting univariate conditional and joint logistic models suggest that innovative ability contributes significantly to explaining the adoption of new technology but does not explain its diffusion the results also indicate that the diffusion of previously available innovations depends on the introduction and adoption of interrelated current innovations

two fallacies concerning central bank independence this paper takes issue with two basic conclusions prevalent in the literature on central bank behavior first the paper argues that it is inappropriate to presume that central banks will in the absence of any precommitment technology necessarily behave in a discretionary fashion that implies an inflationary bias since there is no functional connection between average rates of money creation or inflation and policy responsiveness to cyclical disturbances it is entirely feasible for the bias to be avoided in other words there is no necessary tradeoff between flexibility and commitment second to the extent that the absence of any absolute precommitment technology is nevertheless a problem it will apply to a consolidated central bank plus government entity as well as to the central bank alone thus contracts between governments and central banks do not overcome the motivation for dynamic inconsistency they merely relocate it this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

sustainable international monetary policy cooperation abstract we provide new insight on international monetary policy cooperation in a familiar two country setting a country facing a relatively more volatile markup shock has an incentive to deviate from an assumed cooperation regime to a non cooperation regime a similar result obtains if countries differ in size have non unitary elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods and have different degrees of trade openness home bias in consumption this motivates our study of an endogenous history dependent sustainable cooperation regime its history contingent welfare redistributions are supported by incentive compatible variations in resource transfers through the terms of trade or net exports such an endogenous cooperative solution may also provide a theoretical rationale for perceived occasional cooperation between national central banks in reality

designing domestic institutions for international monetary policy cooperation a utopia abstract in a wide variety of international macroeconomic models monetary policy cooperation is optimal non cooperative policies are inefficient but optimal policies can be attained non cooperatively by optimal design of domestic institutions contracts we show that given endogenous institutional design inefficiencies of non cooperation cannot and will not be eliminated we model the delegation stage explicitly and show that subgame perfect credible contracts chosen by governments based on individual rationality are non zero but are different from optimal contracts and hence lead to inefficient equilibria optimal contracts require cooperation at the delegation stage which is inconsistent with the advocated non cooperative nature of the solution a general solution method for credible contracts and an example from international monetary policy cooperation are considered our results feature delegation as an equilibrium phenomenon explain inefficiencies of existing delegation schemes and hint to a potentially stronger role for supranational authorities in international policy coordination

coalition formation in international monetary policy games abstract this paper analyses coalition formation in monetary policy coordination games between n countries we show that some but not all countries may join if the decision to be a member of the coalition is incentive compatible for the individual country positive spillovers of the coalition formation process and the resulting free rider problem limit the stable coalition size since the coalition members are bound by the union s discipline an outsider can successfully export inflation without fearing that the insiders will try to do the same these gains from staying out arise even in the case of symmetric shocks

measuring producers risk preferences a global risk attitude construct in applied agricultural economic research various risk attitude elicitation techniques are used here we investigate whether risk attitude measures rooted in the expected utility framework are related to measures rooted in the multi item scale framework using a second order factor analytical model and data obtained from personal computer guided interviews with 373 farmers we investigate whether the common variance among the latent risk attitude measures can be accounted for by a global risk attitude construct we find that the different risk attitude measures are related and that the global risk attitude construct is significantly related to farmers intention to use futures contracts our research suggests that farmers risk attitude is a higher order characteristic that cannot be effectively extracted by a single measure in empiricalstudies deal ing with risk risk attitudes and producers market behavior various risk attitude measures are used two major approaches to quantify directly farmers risk attitudes can be distinguished measures derived from the expected utility framework and measures derived from responses to multi item scales e g antle chavas and holt goodwin and schroeder saha shumway and talpaz smidts the purpose of this research is to test whether risk attitude measures rooted in the expected utility framework are related to the risk attitude scales rooted in the multiitem scale approach and if so whether these risk attitude measures share a common

conservative accounting choices managers have sufficient discretion under generally accepted accounting principles gaap to adopt more or less conservative financial reporting policies in this paper we develop a signaling model to provide insight into managers decisions to be conservative in their accounting we provide conditions under which the market can use the manager s exercise of discretion to infer her private information about the future prospects of the firm and thus firm value under these conditions we also show that there are meaningful differences between earnings response coefficients for firms whose managers choose a conservative reporting policy and those whose managers do not finally we use our theoretical model to provide intuition for some established empirical results on earnings response coefficients

conservative central bankers in a two country world abstract in a closed economy framework rogoff has developed the argument that it can be beneficial for society to appoint a conservative central banker we extend this analysis to a two country world in order to take into account the game between the monetary authorities of the two countries we show that conservative central bankers may now deteriorate the situations of both countries and that the distinction between symmetric and asymmetric shocks becomes crucial while symmetric shocks weaken the case for conservative central bankers asymmetric shocks strengthen it the paper also considers the case where central bankers are nominated noncooperatively by the countries

the role of risk and risk aversion in adoption of alternative marketing arrangements by the u s farmers the objective of this article is to analyse the relationship between farmers risk aversions and the riskiness of various agricultural enterprises to see which marketing arrangements would typically emerge relying on the basic agency theory model we hypothesize the prevalence of alternative marketing arrangements amas in situations with high risk averse farmers and high risk enterprises and the prevalence of spot cash markets for low risk averse participants and less risky enterprises our empirical tests are carried out using the 2004 agricultural resource management survey arms the empirical results are largely supportive of the agency theory of contract choice

managerial optimism and earnings smoothing abstract this paper empirically examines how ceo optimism affects earnings smoothing and earnings surprises the main finding is that optimistic managers smooth earnings more than rational managers and are associated with smaller in absolute value earnings surprises a possible theoretical explanation is offered for these results based on a combination of the torpedo effect the innate behavior of optimists and the risk of litigation prosecution for over reporting earnings

a temporal analysis of earnings surprises profits versus losses i show that median earnings surprise has shifted rightward from small negative miss analyst estimates by a small amount to zero meet analyst estimates exactly to small positive beat analyst estimates by a small amount during the 16 years 1984 to 1999 i show that a rightward temporal shift in median surprise from negative to positive describes earnings but neither profits nor losses median profit surprise shifts within the positive quadrant from zero to one cent per share median loss surprise shifts within the negative quadrant from extreme negative about 33 cents per share to zero i show that the median surprise for profits exceeds that for losses in every year i document significant positive temporal trends in both meet and beat analyst estimates for both profits and losses but i find a greater frequency of profits that either meet or beat analyst estimates in every year i find a significant positive temporal trend in positive profits that are a little bit of good news and a significant negative temporal trend in managers who report losses that are an extreme amount of bad news my results are robust to the four internal validity threats i consider namely temporal changes in 1 analyst forecast accuracy 2 the mix of earnings of one sign preceded by earnings of another sign four quarters ago 3 the timeliness of the most recent analyst forecast and 4 the i b e s definition of actual earnings i find that managers of growth firms are relatively more likely than managers of value firms to report good news profits i show that when they do report positive profit surprises managers of growth firms are more likely to report a little bit of good news in every year

a simple approach to international monetary policy coordination this paper analyzes the strategic interaction between the monetary policies of two countries in an intertemporal general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities and imperfect competition it offers an excursus on non cooperative towards cooperative solutions all the results can be read by comparing the strength of the two biases the monopolistic distortions and the terms of trade externalities in the best feasible allocation the larger country retains some monopolistic distortions while the smaller country reaches the competitive level

producer decision making under uncertainty role of past experiences and question framing limited research examines the role of reference points or how uncertain outcomes are processed in producer decisions this study employs a survey containing a split sample choice experiment varying how uncertain outcomes are portrayed and assesses multiple candidate reference points results suggest that u s cattle producers use the best outcome experienced as reference points in their decisions and the method by which uncertain outcomes are presented impacts loss aversion marginal willingness to pay and market participation estimates this illustrates how research employing split samples multiple reference points and alternative methods of portraying uncertain outcomes may better identify producer decision making