material flows vs natural capital what makes an economy sustainable abstract in the discourse about sustainable development constant natural capital is frequently referred to as a criterion for ecological sustainability but what is natural capital the concept will be analyzed by presenting arguments in favour of using the term and different versions of sustainability strong and weak subsequently a critique of the natural capital concept is brought forward from an ecological as well as from an economic perspective following this critique the use of material inputs and the material input per unit of service mips as a measure for the environmental impact potential is suggested dematerialisation is understood to be an alternative management rule for sustainability in conclusion a change of perspective is proposed due to the conceptual and measurement problems associated with the constant natural capital criterion which refers to a stock it seems more reasonable from a scientific as well as from a practical perspective to add flows i e material inputs to a decision criterion for whether a development is sustainable or not

informational content of government hogs and pigs reports we examine the value of the informational content of quarterly government reports which estimate forthcoming supplies of hogs and pigs it is assumed that a hypothetical futures trader obtains the government reports one day in advance of their release a futures market trading rule is established which uses early access to the reports together with a priori expectations of the reports contents we find the market information in the government reports is of little or no value to a futures trader in advance of the release date because this information is already incorporated in the futures price

was the deflation during the great depression anticipated evidence from the commodity futures market futures prices were well above spot prices for most commodities during most of the great depression evidently the spectacular declines in agricultural prices caught many people by surprise based on the historical correlations between commodity prices and consumer prices commodity markets anticipated stable consumer prices during the first year of the great depression the dramatic drop in nominal treasury bill yields thus should be read as a drop in ex ante real rates later in the great depression markets anticipated deflation but not as severe as actually occurred copyright 1992 by american economic association

perceptual and structural barriers to investing in natural capital economics from an ecological footprint perspective this paper argues that perceptual distortions and prevailing economic rationality far from encouraging investment in natural capital actually accelerate the depletion of natural capital stocks moreover conventional monetary analyses cannot detect the problem this paper therefore makes the case for direct biophysical measurement of relevant stocks and flows and uses for this purpose the ecological footprint concept to develop the argument the paper elaborates the natural capital concept and asserts the need of investing in natural capital to compensate for net losses it shows how the ecological footprint can be used as a biophysical measure for such capital and applies this concept as an analytical tool for examining the barriers to investing in natural capital it picks four issues from a rough taxonomy of barriers and discusses them from an ecological footprint perspective it shows why marginal prices cannot reflect ecological necessities how interregional risk pooling encourages resource liquidation how present terms of trade undermine both local and global ecological stability and how efficiency strategies may actually accelerate resource throughput affirming the necessity of biophysical approaches for exploring the sustainability implications of basic ecological and thermodynamic principles it draws lessons for current development

market efficiency in agricultural futures markets market efficiency and unbiasedness are tested in four agricultural commodity futures markets live cattle hogs corn and soybean meal using cointegration and error correction models with gqarch in mean processes results indicate each market is unbiased in the long run although cattle hogs and corn futures markets exhibit short run inefficiencies and pricing biases models for cattle and corn outperform futures prices in out of sample forecasting results also suggest short run time varying risk premiums in cattle and hog futures markets

using usda forecasts to estimate the price flexibility of demand for agricultural commodities we estimate the general equilibrium price flexibility of demand for corn and soybeans using monthly changes in expected supply published by the usda our estimates reflect the demand response to a one year supply shock and thus correspond to the inverse demand elasticity we derive the conditions under which our estimates are consistent and we show how demand flexibility varies by season inventory time horizon and demand composition at average inventory and without accounting for corn ethanol use we obtain price flexibility estimates of 1 35 and 1 03 for corn and soybeans respectively current corn ethanol production levels are associated with much larger absolute flexibilities for both commodities copyright 2012 oxford university press

embracing uncertainty in building energy efficiency policy a case study of a building energy standard abstract quantified goals for reducing energy consumption in buildings play a significant role in national and international energy policy calculations of potential energy savings from different interventions may be unreliable due to various types of uncertainty resulting in a performance gap between predictions and actual energy consumption yet building energy policy continues to rely heavily on apparently robust calculations of energy savings raising the question of why and how the policy process tolerates uncertainty and inaccuracy when quantification is its central logic we describe a case study of the development of a new mandatory building energy standard in which there is a lack of consensus on the energy it would save we found that when this uncertainty was brought to light the policy process raised other unquantified logics in favour of energy efficiency measures using literature on calculation and expertise we discuss how quantification is used in policy making and how uncertainties are repressed enabling the energy performance gap to persist we conclude that broader awareness of the modes in which quantitative and other logics are used in energy policy and a reframing of the types of energy savings to be made may serve policy making better than an illusion of calculative certainty

green accounting and economic policy abstract through the lens of conventional national accounting resource depletion and natural environment degradation often appear misleadingly as desirable economic growth the old system of national accounts sna has been revised and a set of environmental satellite accounts proposed certain weaknesses however pervade the new proposals the conventional measurements remain largely unaltered and the satellite accounts are of unclear purpose and unnecessarily complex as proposed they rely on the valuation of environmental stocks while the economically more important flow accounts to their detriment are to be derived indirectly from changes in stock values the sna the paper stresses is primarily an economic framework incapable of capturing all environmental change and the national accounts are far more useful economically than environmentally greening the accounts would be optional for most affluent countries whose overriding environmental concern is pollution this can be addressed directly through taxation and regulation pollution information in satellite accounts can indeed be valuable but revised and fully integrated resource accounting is a priority concern for those developing countries that are running down natural resources and for which conventional accounting distorts macroeconomic measurement analysis and policy the paper argues that green accounting can only ensure income sometimes called weak sustainability which should be considered as a step leading ultimately to an ecological or stronger sustainability

how does natural resource accounting become powerful in policymaking a case study of changing calculative frames in local energy policy in finland abstract the paper explores the role of natural resource accounting and calculations as tools for inducing movement towards ecologically sound policy making we draw from the theoretical debates in social studies of science and technology sts to understand how calculations gain their power in real world decision making through in depth case analysis of a local energy production decision in finland we study how and under what conditions calculative methods related to environmental valuation affect the rationalities applied in policy decisions on the basis of our analysis we claim that new calculative rationalities do not become significant through changing ways of thinking alone there is a need for shift of calculative framing this shift requires active promotion by powerful actors and furthermore new framings need to become embedded in the rules of the game of decision making our analysis suggests that the methods of sts can provide a valuable tool for economists creation of richer understanding of the dynamics between calculative rationalities and the institutions of decision making in depth case analysis of decision making involving the use of natural resources brings out the multitude of ways in which calculations can take part in or be excluded from the making of natural resource policy

pre harvest price expectations for corn the information content of usda reports and new crop futures this article examines the puzzle of why futures prices continue to react to usda crop reports despite the fact that reports appear to be no longer newsworthy that is provide no better production estimates than private forecasts the information value of reports is measured in terms of their influence on rational agents harvest time corn price expectations which are uncovered using a hamilton type modeling approach results show that reports are still newsworthy as they would contribute to agents price expectations if released a day early thus futures price reactions which closely reflect price expectations are rational and consistent with efficient markets hypothesis copyright 2008 oxford university press

the reaction of live hog futures prices to usda hogs and pigs reports strong concerns about how efficiently live hog futures prices react to u s department of agriculture hogs and pigs reports have been raised by livestock producer groups using market survey data direct tests of the efficient markets hypothesis are performed for the live hog futures market two limit tobit models account for institutional price limits results support the efficient market hypothesis in that live hog futures prices a do not react to anticipated changes in reported information b do react significantly and in the expected direction to unanticipated changes in reported information and c generally adjust to unanticipated information on the day following release of the reports

intraday market effects in electronic soybean futures market during non trading and trading hour announcements abstractthis article investigates market reactions to major united states department of agriculture announcements during non trading and trading hours in the soybean futures market using microstruc

the behavior of bid ask spreads in the electronically traded corn futures market this is the first paper to analyze liquidity costs in agricultural futures markets based on the observed bid ask spread bas faced by market participants the results reveal a highly liquid corn market that mostly offers order execution at minimum cost the bas responds negatively to volume and positively to price volatility but also affects volume traded and price volatility while statistically significant these responses on a cents bushel or a percentage basis are generally small liquidity costs are also virtually impervious to short term changes in demand for spreading and trend following trader activity as well as differences from day of the week changes in market activity much larger cents bushel and percentage changes in bas occur during commodity index trader roll periods and on usda report release days the roll period findings indicate a sunshine trading effect while announcement effects identify the importance of unexpected information and adverse selection on order execution costs overall our research demonstrates that the transition to electronic trading in the corn futures market has led to low and stable liquidity costs despite the market turbulence in 2008 2009

the value of public information in commodity futures markets abstract the informational value of u s department of agriculture usda corn and soybean production forecasts is investigated for the period 1971 1992 three tests of informational content are applied overall the results suggest usda corn and soybean forecasts provide valuable information to participants in commodity futures markets this value does appear to have declined especially since the mid 1980s

sensitivity to exogeneity assumptions in program evaluation in many empirical studies of the effect of social programs researchers assume that conditional on a set of observed covariates assignment to the treatment is exogenous or unconfounded aka selection on observables often this assumption is not realistic and researchers are concerned about the robustness of their results to departures from it one approach e g charles manski 1990 is to entirely drop the exogeneity assumption and investigate what can be learned about treatment effects without it with unbounded outcomes and in the absence of alternative identifying assumptions there are no restrictions on the set of possible values for average treatment effects this does not mean however that all evaluations are equally sensitive to departures from the exogeneity assumption in this paper i explore an alternative approach developed by paul rosenbaum and donald rubin 1983 where the assumption of exogeneity is explicitly relaxed by allowing for a limited amount of correlation between treatment and unobserved components of the outcomes the starting point of the sensitivity analysis is the assumption that the exogeneity assumption is satisfied only conditional on an additional unobserved covariate making assumptions about the effect of the unobserved covariate on the outcome and its correlation with the treatment i trace out the set of possible values for the treatment effect of interest by considering a sufficiently large set of possible correlations with outcomes and treatment one can recover the bounds on the treatment effect derived by manski 1990 the approach here in the spirit of rosenbaum and rubin 1983 and rosenbaum 1995 is to allow only a limited amount of correlation and to judge the sensitivity of average treatment effect estimates to such correlations there are two novel features of the proposed analysis first rather than formulate the sensitivity in terms of coefficients on the unobserved covariate the sensitivity results are presented in terms of partial r values which may be easier to interpret second the partial r values of the unobserved covariates are compared to those for the observed covariates in order to facilitate judgments regarding the plausibility of values necessary to substantially change results obtained under exogeneity the proposed sensitivity analysis is conceptually related to the practice of assessing sensitivity of estimates by comparisons with results obtained by discarding one or more observed covariates james heckman and v joseph hotz 1989 rajeev dehejia and sadek wahba 1999 jeffrey smith and petra todd 2001 the attraction of the sensitivity analysis is that it is more directly relevant one is not interested in what would have happened in the absence of covariates actually observed but in biases that are the result from not observing all relevant covariates

quantifying the wasde announcement effect this article uses a two stage gls model to quantify the world agricultural supply and demand estimates wasde announcement effect for cotton soybeans and hard winter wheat controlling for important factors associated with commodity price volatility the information presented by the overlapping nature of futures contracts is exploited to estimate conditional effects by month inventory conditions and delivery horizon results in this article show that the wasde announcement effect persists across contract positions is not limited to months that include nass crop survey data is amplified during low carryover periods for soybeans and wheat and is rapidly incorporated into futures prices

end user preferences for usda market information abstract buyers and sellers of agricultural commodities benefit from public provision of information in decision making processes the purpose of this study is to improve understanding of current preferences for public agricultural information results indicate preference for farm level reports by extension agents and leading economic indicators by agribusiness or market analysts implications are outlined for ongoing discussions regarding maintenance of public investment in an era of tightening u s federal budgets

are harvest forecasts news usda announcements and futures market reactions futures market price data for maize and soyabeans are used to examine reactions to us department of agriculture harvest forecasts these forecasts are widely known and reasonably accurate so failure to find significant reaction would indicate that the usda did not contribute additional news relative to information already possessed by traders various t tests f tests and nonparametric chi square tests indicate rejection of the null hypothesis of no significant difference between means of absolute values or variances of changes in closing prices on days following a usda announcement and other days thus the data indicate that significant information is contained in the forecasts

environmental regulations and the problem of sustainability moving beyond market failure abstract the standard metaphor of market failure is an impediment to the crafting of environmental policy that can escape policy lock in sustainability requires a policy process that can avoid this lock in sustainability concerns the creation of dynamic human processes that can respond to indeed anticipate unanticipated feedback from biological processes

small streams diverse sources who invests in renewable energy in finland during the financial downturn this article addresses the investment gap in renewable energy sources identified by several authors examining the case of a country finland which introduced policy measures to diversify its renewable energy portfolio we analyse the development of investments in renewable heat and power in response to new policy measures and contextual factors during the downturn period 2009 2013 we investigate investor heterogeneity i e the diversity of logics employed by different types of res investors in spite of a severe financial recession we find an emergence of new sources of investment among these new investor types we find diversity in investment drivers and available options these include investors mobilized by the feed in tariff to seek profitable targets and investors such as real estate owners investing in heat pumps for their own use and benefiting from low interest rates we find that the diversification of investors supports the diversification in res sources and brings in new investors undeterred by the financial downturn our findings imply that policy makers should recognize that the responses to distinct incentives and pressures vary by investor types this also means that a mix of policies is required to maximize the contribution of different sectors to filling the renewable energy investment gap

when do the usda forecasters make mistakes this study analysed forecasts for all us corn soya bean and wheat categories published within the world agricultural supply and demand estimates wasde reports over the 1987 88 through 2009 10 marketing years in an attempt to identify patterns and better understand when the usda forecasters make mistakes two general sources of errors were investigated behavioural and macroeconomic factors the first objective was to examine how these factors affect the size of the forecast error and the second concentrated on the direction of the error due to these effects our findings suggest that the largest increase in the size of usda forecast errors was associated with structural changes in commodity markets that took place in the mid 2000s corn soya bean and wheat forecast errors also grew during the periods of economic growth and with changes in exchange rates while inflation and changes in oil price had a much smaller impact with respect to behavioural sources we identified patterns consistent with leni

quasi rational and ex ante price expectations in commodity supply models an empirical analysis of the us broiler market a statistically optimal inference about agents ex ante price expectations within the us broiler market is derived using futures prices of related commodities along with a quasi rational forecasting regression equation the modelling approach which builds on a hamilton type framework includes endogenous production and allows expected cash price to be decomposed into anticipated and unanticipated components we therefore infer the relative importance of various informational sources in expectation formation results show that in addition to the quasi rational forecast the true supply shock future prices and ex post commodity price forecast errors have at times been influential in broiler producers price expectations copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

the impact of public and semi public information on cotton futures market abstractthis study estimated the impact of all major public and semi public reports on the cotton futures market from 1995 through 2012 the estimation was based on the event study approach with the events measured by the release of five major reports export sales crop progress world agricultural supply and demand estimates wasde and prospective plantings public reports from us department of agriculture and cotton this month semi public report from international cotton advisory committee the best fitting igarch 1 1 t model that accounted for the day of week seasonality and stock levels was used to measure the report effects on daily nearby cotton close to close futures returns prospective plantings and wasde reports appeared to be the most important sources of information in the cotton markets moving the conditional standard deviation of returns by an average of 14 4 and 9 6 percentage points respectively however significant market reaction was not found for the other three reports our an

are revisions to usda crop production forecasts smoothed this article uses nordhaus framework to determine the efficiency of the revision process for usda corn and soybean production forecasts over the 1970 1971 through 2004 2005 marketing years positive autocorrelation and consistency of directional changes in forecast revisions suggest these forecasts are smoothed evidence is provided that the loss in forecast accuracy due to smoothing is statistically and economically significant in several cases a conservative bias in farm operators assessments of yield potential and in the procedure for translating enumerator s information about plant fruit counts into objective yield estimates are identified as plausible sources of smoothing

the rationality of usda forecasts under multivariate asymmetric loss a large number of previous studies suggest that many usda forecasts are biased and or inefficient these findings however may be the result of the assumed loss function of usda forecasters we test the rationality of the usda net cash income forecasts and the wasde production and price forecasts between 1988 and 2018 using a flexible multivariate loss function that allows for asymmetric loss and non separable forecast errors our results provide robust evidence that usda forecasters are rational expected loss minimizers yet demonstrate a tendency to place a greater weight on under or overprediction as a result this study provides an alternate interpretation of previous findings of forecast irrationality

inventory shocks and the oil ethanol grain price nexus we analyze the effects of oil and grain inventory data releases on oil ethanol corn and soy futures prices oil and grain inventory shocks are identified as the percent difference between actual inventory levels and median predictions from a survey of forecasters ethanol futures prices alone are found to respond to both oil and grain inventory shocks other energy futures prices respond only to oil inventory shocks while agricultural commodity futures prices respond only to grain inventory shocks