natural gas futures bias predictive performance and the theory of storage this study reports several empirical findings concerning natural gas futures prices first spot and futures prices are non stationary and the observed trends are due to positive drifts in the random walk components of the prices rather than possible deterministic time trends second market forecast errors are stationary third futures are less than expected future spot prices so that futures are backwardated fourth the bias in the futures prices is time varying fifth futures have statistically significant market timing ability despite the bias in the magnitude forecasts finally the data lends partial support to the cost of carry theory of the basis determination

institutional arrangements for rural poverty reduction and resource conservation summary this paper introduces a special issue featuring a set of papers on institutional arrangements for reconciling rural poverty reduction with renewable natural resources conservation in the low income tropics collectively these papers make four core points first synergies do not naturally emerge just because rural poverty reduction and renewable natural resources conservation are each appealing goals with common drivers and some intrinsic interlinkage second it matters less which rules a community or country adopts than how well they monitor and enforce the rules they set third flexibility and adaptability in design are critical to establishing cooperative partnerships that can advance both conservation and development goals fourth multiscalar approaches are commonly desirable

foreign exchange market efficiency and common stochastic trends abstract in a recent paper baillie and bollerslev 1989 using daily data from 1980 to 1985 identified six common stochastic trends in a vector of seven nominal exchange rates implying the existence of one cointegrating vector cointegration implies that granger causality must run in at least one direction that is at least one of the exchange rates is predictable using current available information this result has been interpreted as foreign exchange market inefficiency by many another interpretation is suggested if the stationary linear combination of spot rates proxies for a time varying risk premium in some way then these results could be explained in a rational and risk averse market this possibility is eliminated if the time series properties of the risk premium are incompatible with those of the error correction term specifically it is demonstrated that the forward risk premium is non stationary for the exchange rates that comprise the exchange rate cointegration relationship in this paper the existence of common stochastic trends in a vector of nominal exchange rates is tested over the period 1974 to 1991 the efficiency of foreign exchange markets is then tested by examining the implications of stochastic trends in the forward premium and what this means for the time series properties of a time varying forward risk premium jel f31 g14

common property institutions and sustainable governance of resources abstract the literature on common property based resource management comprises many important studies that seek to specify the conditions under which groups of users will self organize and sustainably govern resources upon which they depend using three of the more comprehensive such studies and with an extensive review of writings on the commons this paper demonstrates that the enterprise of generating lists of conditions under which commons are governed sustainably is a flawed and impossibly costly research task for a way out the paper examines the relative merits of statistical comparative and case study approaches to studying the commons it ends with a plea for careful research design and sample selection construction of causal mechanisms and a shift toward comparative and statistical rather than single case analyses such steps are necessary for a coherent empirically relevant theory of the commons

trading strategies with implied forward credit default swap spreads credit default risk for an obligor can be hedged with either a credit default swap cds or a constant maturity credit default swap cmcds we find strong evidence of persistent differences in the hedging cost associated with the two comparable contracts between 2001 and 2006 it would have been more profitable to sell cds and buy cmcds while after the crisis between 2008 and 2013 the opposite strategy was profitable panel data tests indicate that for our sample period the implied forward cds rates are unbiased estimates of future spot cds rates the changes in the company implied volatility is the main determinant of trading inefficiencies followed by the changes in gdp and in the interest rates before the crisis and the changes in sentiment index and in the vix after the crisis

does privatization improve job satisfaction the case of ghana this paper analyzes the impacts of privatization in ghana on the basis of a survey of 300 workers in privatized and state owned enterprises the findings indicate a significant positive relationship between privatization and job satisfaction whereas monthly wage is an important determinant of job satisfaction in state owned enterprises education and the availability of training opportunities are strong determinants in privatized enterprises the study also shows that there exists a variety of instruments to implement a privatization program smoothly

on the endogeneity of resource comanagement theory and evidence from indonesia we examine theoretically the emergence of participatory comanagement agreements that share between state and user the management of resources and the benefits from use going beyond user user interactions our state user model addresses a critical question when will comanagement arise in order to consider the right baseline for evaluating comanagement s forest and welfare impacts we then compare our model s hypotheses concerning de facto rights negotiated agreements and transfers all endogenous with community level data including observed agreements in a protected indonesian forest these unique data could refute the model despite being limited but instead offer support

technology change as a policy response to promote changes in land management for environmental benefits a previous study developed a framework for choosing among groups of policy mechanisms for encouraging environmentally beneficial land use change the framework highlights that these choices should depend on the relative levels of private or internal net benefits and public or external net benefits incentive based mechanisms polluter pays and or beneficiary pays and extension need to be targeted carefully to appropriate projects where private net benefits are close to zero and or public net benefits are more extremely positive or negative this article focuses on policy mechanisms that alter the net benefits of changing land management including r d to develop new technologies and training to improve the skill of landholders at using existing technologies these policy options are now treated more comprehensively within the public benefits private benefits framework benefits of technology change projects can include reductions in the opportunity cost of compliance with environmental programs increases in the public benefits of a particular type of land use change or improvements in private net benefits resulting in public benefits through greater or more rapid adoption by private landholders from an environmental management perspective technology development is most relevant where public net benefits of land use change are positive and private net benefits are negative but not highly negative there is a set of projects for which technology change is the only viable alternative to no action highlighting the importance of technology change in these cases

context dependent biodiversity conservation management regimes theory and simulations ecosystem degradation hasmotivated a search for successful conservation approaches the perceived failure of state directed protected areas in the tropics has prompted experimentation with community management and co management strategies numerous case studies suggest that none of these are effective universally there exists however little analytical or empirical work to identify under what conditions one arrangement will be more effective than another this paper develops a model of statedependent equilibrium conservation management design that identifies the comparative advantage of different managers in the interest of appropriately locating authority for conservation tasks as a function of prevailing biophysical economic and sociopolitical conditions

multinational oil companies and the adoption of sustainable development a resource based and institutional theory interpretation of adoption heterogeneity sustainable development is often framed as a social issue to which corporations should pay attention because it offers both opportunities and challenges through the use of institutional theory and the resource based view of the firm we shed some light on why more than 20 years after sustainable development was first introduced we see neither the adoption of this business model as dominant nor its converse that is the total abandonment of the model as unworkable and unprofitable we focus on multinational corporations mncs because they were among the organizations first called to take action in order to illustrate the institutional pressures mncs face and their strategic response to these pressures we analysed four major oil and gas multinationals subject to similar sustainable development pressures climate change biodiversity renewable energy development and social investment we argue that normative and coercive isomorphism does not occur at the global level because sustainable development is largely a stakeholder driven rather than a broad social pressure that is host country interpretation of sustainable development pressures varies across an mnc s subsidiary network based on the analysis of the four major mncs annual reports from 2000 to 2005 we argue that mimetic isomorphism may occur but since it implies the use of complex and intangible resources mimetic processes are slow rare and discretionary

design principles for managing coastal fisheries commons in present day japan abstract ostrom 1990 challenged the traditional belief that commons management inevitably requires state ownership or privatization and instead established the notion of user self governance this notion a third policy option for managing the commons entails little or no state involvement under this notion ostrom developed eight design principles to which self governing institutional arrangements adhere while the role of the state is minimal this article seeks to establish whether design principles characterize such institutional arrangements when the role of the state is accommodated explicitly within the principles drawing on a case study of present day management of japan s community based coastal fisheries commons our study shows that the design principles can better characterize self governing institutional arrangements when the state adopts a pro user self governance role that provides strategic support for users but neither takes ownership of the commons nor participates in engineering the institutional arrangements

testing for forward rate unbiasedness on regression in levels and in returns several recent empirical studies have been forced to reject exact 1 1 cointegration between spot and forward exchange rates theoretically this is shown to provide a possible explanation for the puzzling negative estimates reported from spot return forward premium regressions in particular the coefficient in this regression has a unit root component in its limit distribution that imparts a bias and skewness to the estimator simulations are used to demonstrate how even very small deviations from 1 1 cointegration can result in substantial bias the empirical evidence suggests that the implied dickey fuller type terms do exhibit a downward bias yet are of insufficient magnitude to fully account for the puzzling regression coefficients mentioned above

public benefits private benefits and policy mechanism choice for land use change for environmental benefits the choice of policy mechanisms for encouraging environmentally beneficial land use change should depend on the relative levels of private or internal net benefits and public or external net benefits a map of recommended policy mechanisms is developed depending on the relative levels of these variables positive incentives negative incentives and extension need to be targeted carefully to appropriate projects where private net benefits are closer to zero and or public net benefits are more extremely positive or negative technology development is suggested where private net costs outweigh public net benefits no action is recommended for many potential projects

changing beliefs and systematic rational forecast errors with evidence from foreign exchange this paper addresses a new interpretation to the appearance in the early 1980s of systematic errors in forecasting the dollar exchange rate following a change in the process of a fundamental variable market participants revise their beliefs about the process using bayes rule since the market does not immediately recognize the change forecast errors are on average wrong during a period when the market is rationally learning for conservative parameter values the learning behavior of the dollar exchange rate in the early 1980s appears consistent with about half of the dollar s underprediction implied by the forward market copyright 1989 by american economic association

making the commons work conservation and cooperation in ireland commonage represents land held under common property that incorporates a system of local cooperative arrangements and rules to conserve and manage the irish uplands we analyze the institutional and economic factors that influence the behavior of commonage farmers under a common property regime using a recursive bivariate probit model results show that 1 cooperation has a positive and important impact on commonage conservation 2 agricultural policies by way of livestock premia increase the level of degradation while 3 farm financial support through agrienvironment measures positively affects commonage conservation and encourages cooperation between farmers

the emergence of cooperation among egoists this article investigates the conditions under which cooperation will emerge in a world of egoists without central authority this problem plays an important role in such diverse fields as political philosophy international politics and economic and social exchange the problem is formalized as an iterated prisoner s dilemma with pairwise interaction among a population of individuals results from three approaches are reported the tournament approach the ecological approach and the evolutionary approach the evolutionary approach is the most general since all possible strategies can be taken into account a series of theorems is presented which show 1 the conditions under which no strategy can do any better than the population average if the others are using the reciprocal cooperation strategy of tit for tat 2 the necessary and sufficient conditions for a strategy to be collectively stable and 3 how cooperation can emerge from a small cluster of discriminating individuals even when everyone else is using a strategy of unconditional defection

socio ecological explanations for crowding out effects from economic field experiments in southern africa abstract economic and psychological literature mentions three conditions under which the crowding out effect of pro social behaviour is likely to occur and to crowd out citizens moral obligations to behave co operatively i use a framed field experiment on joint extraction from a common pool resource cpr where the crowding out effect has already been reported before in combination with the trust game carried out in farming communities of namibia and south africa to replicate these conditions the research design and the cross cultural setting enable to explicitly control for these effects the results of the experiments support that the crowding out effect depends on the nature of the external intervention controlling vs supportive external intervention the degree of participants self determination high vs low self determination in the group a society s norms of trust and reciprocity high vs low trust within the society the results imply that outside regulations aiming to conserve natural resources risk worsening the situation when neglecting democratic legitimization as well as local community norms

common property and collective action in economic development abstract a fundamental issue in many ldcs is the degree to which natural resource mismanagement is caused by common property arrangements this view has led to widespread attempts to privatize forests rangelands and water resources many of these efforts have failed to stop overuse and have contributed to inequality in resource distribution this paper seriously questions this approach and describes a number of reasons why common property may continue to be both efficient and equitable complementing and combining with private rights in a way consistent with the resource endowments of village economies a theoretical approach is outlined showing that the tragedy of the commons is an unsatisfactory model of common property an alternative model is presented together with a call for research into institutional alternatives in resource management

motivation crowding in environmental protection evidence from an artefactual field experiment abstract this paper examines how motivation crowding and social image affect environmental conservation decisions an artefactual field experiment conducted in bolivia is used to reproduce the trade off between individual and social benefits in natural resource use and test the effect of non monetary and non regulatory incentives on pro social behavior for environmental conservation the results show the presence of a social norm prescribing positive contribution towards environmental protection and that external incentives have heterogeneous effects on pro social behavior depending on how they influence reputation and self image the experimental results differ from those of analogous experiments conducted in the laboratory and are instead consistent with those from field experiments on common pool resource management this fact suggests caution in generalizing conclusions reached in the laboratory to different settings and populations

the management of common property resources collective action as an alternative to privatisation or state regulation can locally based collective action be a viable way to manage common property resources many writers on collective action and common property are sweepingly pessimistic about the ability of the people who face problems of common property to organize sustainable patterns of use for themselves this paper shows with reference to prisoners dilemma garett hardin s tragedy of the commons and mancur olson s logic of collective action that the analytical basis for this pessimism is weak in many situations of village based common property resource use there can thus be no general presumption that the collective action route to common property resource management will fail any more than there can be a general presumption that it will work the paper suggests a number of general factors to do with the characteristics of the resources the user group and group state relations on which chances of success depend

forward exchange market unbiasedness the case of the australian dollar since 1984 abstract this paper implements a robust statistical approach to regression with non stationary time series the methods were recently developed in other work and are briefly exposited here they allow us to perform regressions in levels with non stationary time series data they accommodate data distributions with heavy tails and they permit serial dependence and temporal heterogeneity of unknown form in the equation errors with these features the methods are well suited to applications with frequently sampled exchange rate data which generally display all of these empirical characteristics our application here is to daily data on spot and forward exchange rates between the australian and us dollars over the period 1984 1991 following the deregulation of the australian foreign exchange market we find big differences between the robust and the non robust regression outcomes and in the associated statistical tests of the hypothesis that the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate the robust tests reject the unbiasedness hypothesis but still give the forward rate an important role as a predictor of the future spot rate

coordination versus prisoners dilemma implications for international cooperation and regimes the study of political institutions in general and international cooperation in particular has been beneficially influenced by the prisoners dilemma pd game model but there is a mistaken tendency to treat pd as representing the singular problem of collective action and cooperation by relaxing the assumptions of 2 2 games and developing an alternate model of the coordination game i show how some cooperation problems have very different properties from those found in pd the analytical results of the two games are compared across several important dimensions number of strategies available number of iterations of the game numbers of players and the distribution of power among them the discussion is illustrated with specific problems of international cooperation and the implications of alternative cooperation problems for the formation and performance of international regimes are explored the basic solutions for pd and coordination have divergent ramifications for the institutionalization stability and adaptability of regimes and for the role of hegemony in the international system however the coordination model does not replace the pd model but complements and supplements it as a way to understand the diversity of political institutions these results are widely applicable to areas of politics beyond international relations

rethinking an old empirical puzzle econometric evidence on the forward discount anomaly using both semiparametric and parametric estimation methods this paper corroborates earlier findings of fractionally integrated behaviour in the forward premium two new explanations are also proposed to help reconcile earlier conflicting empirical evidence on the time series properties of the forward premium traditional regression approaches used to test the forward rate unbiasedness hypothesis are then evaluated including regression in levels in returns fama s 1984 regression and in error correction format interesting statistical and or interpretive implications are found in all three cases for example the predictions of the appropriate nonstandard limit theory are consistent with many of the standard empirical results reported from fama s regression including the commonly occurring yet puzzling negative correlations between spot returns and the forward premium it is suggested that the principal failure of unbiasedness may be due instead to the difference in persistence between these two series copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

the political economy of wildlife exploitation in this paper we analyze the exploitation of wildlife in a third world context in the model there are two agents an agency managing a habitat area of fixed size and a group of peasants the agency managing the habitat area has the legal right to exploit the wildlife while the local people hunt illegally introducing the concept of relative harvesting dominance we demonstrate that the stock utilization depends crucially on the prevailing economic and ecological conditions it is also shown that the existing property rights regime appears in different forms depending on these conditions

public enterprise for whom perverse distributional consequences of public operational decisions one better off without making anyone else worse off i define a politically efficient reallocation as one which makes someone better off without making anyone else aware that he is worse off transferring income from one individual or segment of society to another is both a duty and a privilege of political power in accomplishing this end pareto efficient reallocations are naturally preferred but are in regrettably short supply accordingly a political second best solution is sought for and found in politically efficient transfers manipulation of the policies of public enterprises provides an excellent vehicle for concealing transfer effects from the losers it is decidedly superior to taxes in this regard since only the conspicuously ignorant are unaware that they are being dunned by sales and personal income taxes and an increasing number of consumers are aware that much of corporate income taxes and import duties also fall on them compare the opportunities in public enterprise if an enterprise consumes its capital or forgoes transfers to the treasury to subsidize consumers are the losers whether taxpayers or users of government services aware of it this paper asks three questions concerning the subsidies implicit in the operational decisions of public enterprises first who benefits second who pays third why do these particular results come about only operational decisions are considered the very important distributional consequences of nationalization policies or the choice of public over private ownership are ignored the focus will be on perverse distributional policies that is those which purport to benefit the poor but which end up helping the rich the resulting paper is rather

a reconsideration of the uncovered interest parity relationship abstract this paper argues that the uncovered interest parity uip relationship is distinct from and more important than the unbiasedness of forward exchange rates as predictors of future spot rates the standard finding that the slope estimate b is roughly 3 in regressions of s t on t 1 s t 1 implies rejection of unbiasedness but not necessarily uip the hypothesis that monetary authorities manage interest rates so as to smooth their movements while also resisting changes in exchange rates is attractive conceptually and is capable of explaining not only the b 3 finding but also several other notable features of the data

causality between financial development and economic growth an application of vector error correction and variance decomposition methods to saudi arabia this article makes an attempt to test the possible directions of causality between financial development and economic growth which were labelled by patrick 1966 as the supply leading and demand following hypothesis saudi arabia is taken as a case study the methods applied are the error correction and variance decompositions techniques including the most recently developed long run structural modelling lrsm pesaran and shin 2002 which by imposing exactly identifying and overidentifying restrictions on the cointegrating vector has taken care of a major limitation of the conventional cointegrating estimates in that they were atheoretical in nature to the best of our knowledge there has not been any study on this issue with the application of the techniques that incorporate lrsm the stability of the functions has also been tested by cumulative sum cusum cumulative sum of squares cusumsq and chow test chow tests our findings based on the above mentioned rigorous techniques tend to s

multiple maturities and time varying risk premia in forward exchange markets abstract this paper derives the necessary conditions for an intertemporal optimization problem faced by an international investor who can enter forward contracts of several maturity dates and simultaneously borrow in domestic money markets the model parameters are estimated and the overidentifying restrictions are tested using hansen s proposed gmm technique the restrictions are strongly rejected when forward premia are used as instruments the risk neutral specification is rejected when expenditures on non durables and services are used as the consumption measure possible explanations for these rejections are provided

institution building multilateral development banks and state owned enterprises abstract despite the increasing popularity of privatization in latin america many large and important firms will remain in the public sector and for those firms improved economic performance is essential if a constant drain on developing country treasuries is to be avoided this paper analyzes the improvements in enterprise performance that may occur as a result of cooperation between state owned enterprise soes and multilateral development banks and argues that the combination of softer terms and harder conditions may help soe management increase the operational efficiency of their firms the experience of the paraguayan state firm ande and the inter american development bank is examined and found to provide evidence in support of this hypothesis

robust tests of forward exchange market efficiency with empirical evidence from the 1920s summary this paper provides a robust statistical approach to testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in forward exchange market efficiency studies the methods we use allow us to work explicitly with levels rather than differenced data they are statistically robust to data distributions with heavy tails and they can be applied to data sets where the frequency of observation and the futures maturity do not coincide in addition our methods allow for stochastic trend non stationarity and general forms of serial dependence the methods are applied to daily data of spot exchange rates and forward exchange rates during the 1920s which marked the first episode of a broadly general floating exchange rate system the tail behaviour of the data is analysed using an adaptive data based method for estimating the tail slope of the density the results confirm the need for the use of robust regression methods we find cointegration between the forward rate and spot rate for the four currencies we consider the belgian and french francs the italian lira and the us dollar all measured against the british pound we find support for a stationary risk premium in the case of the belgian franc the italian lira and the us dollar and we find support for the simple market efficiency hypothesis where the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate and there is a zero mean risk premium in the case of the us dollar