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

extreme return connectedness and its determinants between clean green and dirty energy investments abstract previous studies point to the time variation and asymmetry in the relationship between clean energy stocks and crude oil markets but there is a lack of evidence on the return spillovers between clean green assets and dirty energy assets crude oil and energy etf in lower and upper quantiles and their potential drivers to address these gaps we apply quantile based estimators to measure return connectedness at left and right tails of the conditional distribution of return shocks we find that the average level of return connectedness estimated at the mean median is 29 whereas it reaches 65 when estimated at the left and right tails thus return connectedness across clean energy stocks green bonds crude oil and energy etf is larger at both left and right tails implying that the unsuitability of applying mean based connectedness measures furthermore we show that return connectedness measures vary with time but they are less volatile in the tails notably return connectedness differs between periods of extreme negative returns and periods of extreme negative returns suggesting an asymmetric behaviour an analysis of the drivers of the return connectedness shows the importance of macroeconomic conditions especially at middle and lower quantiles us dollar has a positive impact in all cases whereas the crude oil market uncertainty intensifies the return spillovers at the lower quantile

oil prices and the stock prices of alternative energy companies energy security issues coupled with increased concern over the natural environment are driving factors behind oil price movements while it is widely accepted that rising oil prices are good for the financial performance of alternative energy companies there has been relatively little statistical work done to measure just how sensitive the financial performance of alternative energy companies are to changes in oil prices in this paper a four variable vector autoregression model is developed and estimated in order to investigate the empirical relationship between alternative energy stock prices technology stock prices oil prices and interest rates our results show technology stock prices and oil prices each individually granger cause the stock prices of alternative energy companies simulation results show that a shock to technology stock prices has a larger impact on alternative energy stock prices than does a shock to oil prices these results should be of use to investors managers and policy makers

oil market conditions and sovereign risk in mena oil exporters and importers abstract we analyze for the first time how various levels of oil returns and oil volatility changes affect sovereign risk in static and time varying settings empirical analyses involve daily data from february 14 2011 to november 23 2018 covering a sample of mena oil exporters and importers the results from a quantile based approach show that the sovereign risk of mena oil exporters and importers is directionally predicted by shocks in oil prices and oil volatility especially during the oil crash of 2014 2016 overall the impact of oil returns and volatility changes occur in a very short time span that is within one day lag and the quantile specific reactions of sovereign risk spreads are time varying the impact of oil returns is asymmetric across quantiles the results hold when we control for stock market returns the findings have implications for investors in terms of portfolio and risk management importantly the findings are useful to policymakers for sovereign risk management decisions the cost of sovereign borrowing and the market timing of debt issuance finally the findings matter to bankers given that central and domestic banks hold large amounts of sovereign debt which makes banking systems particularly exposed to their own sovereign stress

adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries a survey this paper reviews various studies which have provided a description and possible explanation to patterns of innovation adoption in the agricultural sector the survey points out that the tendency of many studies to consider innovation adoption in dichotomous terms adoption nonadoption may not be appropriate in many cases where the actual decisions are defined over a more continuous range more attention needs to be given to the socio cultural and institutional environment in area studies so that their interrelation with economic factors affecting adoption can be inferred the presence of several interrelated innovations is another aspect that needs to be considered more carefully in future research since a number of simultaneous decisions may be involved furthermore the possibility of regular sequential patterns in adopting components of a new technological package should be specifically addressed in future studies finally the impact of differential adoption rates on land holding distribution merits attention in future research

connectedness network and dependence structure mechanism in green investments abstract we present an empirical study of renewable energy stock returns and their relation to four major investment asset classes stocks currency us treasury bonds and oil and several sources of uncertainty applying nonlinear causality and connectedness network analysis on data covering the period 2004 2016 we investigate the directionality and connectedness among different asset classes as well as between uncertainties first from the results of the estimation of directionality and network spillovers it can be concluded that the european stock market has a strong market dependence on renewable energy stock prices second uncertainties have an economically significant impact on both return and volatility spillover in energy investments third most of the uncertainties are net transmitters of volatility connectedness during the global financial crisis gfc and european sovereign debt crisis esdc

conservation agriculture organic marketing and collective action in the honduran hillsides conservation agriculture ca is often perceived to provide win win outcomes for farmers leading to reduced erosion and off site sedimentation as well as improved soil fertility and productivity however adoption rates for ca in many regions of the world remain below expected levels this article looks at the effects of participation in organic markets and farmers organizations on the adoption of soil conservation practices based on original survey data from 241 small scale farm households in honduras we find that both participation in organic markets and farmer based groups have positive effects on the number of soil conservation practices adopted the results indicate that besides supply oriented policy measures such as the provision of technical assistance and extension demand related factors are likely to play an important role in sustainable soil management demand oriented policy measures include support for labeling initiatives and consumer education to facilitate value added product differentiation and market segmentation jel classifications q01 q12 q13 q16

crude oil and the macroeconomy tests of some popular notions a note perhaps no other economic events in the post world war ii era have generated as much attention as the series of crude oil price shocks that have jolted the world economy since the opec boycott of 1973 a tremendous amount of space in the popular and professional literature has been devoted to analyzing the impacts of these shocks on the developed economies and the adjustments these shocks have induced one residual of this literature has been a general impression that since 1973 the functional relationship between crude oil prices and the developed macroeconomies has been dramatically and fundamentally altered yet to our knowledge no one has formally tested this impression recent evidence of hamilton 1983 suggests that crude oil prices had a strong impact on the u s business cycle well before 1973 further while textbook treatments of oil price shocks tend to highlight cost push inflationary effects the research of berndt and wood 1975 1979 and wilcox 1983 indicates the net complementarity between energy and capital in the u s economy is quite strong both before and after 1973 thus oil price shocks may have stronger real effects than generally believed in this paper we formally test three popular notions associated with the so called

modeling technology adoption in developing countries an analysis of technology adoption decisions by poor farmers is provided some possible empirical models for studying technology adoption are reviewed the issue of theoretical consistency is dealt with in terms of the costs of such consistency measured in data needs and model complexity and the benefits measured in terms of understanding the micro economic foundations of adoption

the dynamic dependence of fossil energy investor sentiment and renewable energy stock markets abstract this study investigates the dynamic directional information spillover of return and volatility between the fossil energy market investor sentiment towards renewable energy and the renewable energy stock market using the connectedness network approach empirical results show that the spillover effects of the volatility system are generally stronger than that of the return system which suggest that risk transmission among the markets is more obvious in both systems the impact of the fossil energy market especially crude oil on the renewable energy stock market is greater than the impact of investor sentiment on the renewable energy stock market this finding shows that the renewable energy stock market is closely related to the fossil energy market furthermore the rolling window approach is adopted to examine the time varying information spillover among them the dynamic findings suggest that investor sentiment towards renewable energy can explain the return and volatility of renewable energy stock to a certain degree

resource degradation low agricultural productivity and poverty in sub saharan africa pathways out of the spiral sub saharan africa ssa has the lowest agricultural productivity in the world while almost half of the population lives below us 1 per day the biggest development policy challenge is to find appropriate solutions to end hunger and poverty in the region building on several years of empirical research conducted in east africa this paper identifies potential strategies for sustainable development in this region in general the empirical evidence reviewed confirms that different strategies are needed in different development domains of ssa nevertheless some elements will be common to all successful strategies including assurance of peace and security a stable macroeconomic environment provision of incentives through markets where markets function development of market institutions where they do not and public and private investment in an appropriate mix of physical human natural and social capital the differences in strategies across these domains mainly reflect differences in the mix of those investments as influenced by different comparative advantages

oil shocks and their impact on energy related stocks in china abstract this paper contributes to the current literature by adopting time varying conditional correlation and asset pricing models to discover how the dynamics of international oil prices affect energy related stock returns in china after conditioning for structural instability the results show a much stronger relation following the 2008 financial crisis we argue that this reflects the fact that investors in the chinese stock market especially for energy related stocks are more sensitive to the shocks in international crude oil market

information linkage dynamic spillovers in prices and volatility between the carbon and energy markets abstract the european union emissions trading system eu ets has strengthened the information flow and connection between carbon market and energy markets which makes the carbon energy system more complicated this paper investigates information linkages and dynamic spillover effects between the carbon and energy markets we adopt a systemic time series approach to study connectedness in both returns and volatility in the carbon energy system moreover a rolling windows method is used to show the dynamic features empirical results show that brent oil prices play an important role in affecting carbon price changes and risks feedback exists from the carbon market to other energy markets and electricity prices are shown to be the biggest information receiver in the system it is also shown that the level of connectedness in the volatility system is substantially higher than that in the returns system our results can provide useful implications for policymakers to design market mechanisms and market investors to manage their portfolios

naked exclusion with minimum share requirements we consider a class of contracts in which buyers commit to giving a seller some minimum share of their total purchases we show that such contracts can be used by an incumbent seller to reduce the probability of entry by a rival seller when the incumbent can commit to its selling price as part of the contract we further show that such contracts can be profitable for the incumbent even when exclusive dealing would not be and even when buyers can coordinate their accept or reject decisions the average price paid by the buyers will be higher and welfare will be lower whether or not the incumbent s exclusionary conduct turns out to be successful in preventing entry

a model for the federal funds rate target this paper is a statistical analysis of the manner in which the federal reserve determines the level of the federal funds rate target one of the most publicized and anticipated economic indicators in the financial world the paper introduces new statistical tools for forecasting a discrete valued time series such as the target and suggests that these methods in conjunction with a focus on the institutional details of how the target is determined can significantly improve on standard vector autoregression forecasts of the effective federal funds rate we further show that the news that the fed has changed the target has statistical content substantially different from the news that the fed failed to make an anticipated target change causing us to challenge some of the conclusions drawn from standard linear var impulse response functions

shifts in volatility driven by large stock market shocks abstract this paper presents an extension of the stochastic volatility model which allows for level shifts in volatility of stock market returns known as structural breaks these shifts are endogenously driven by large return shocks innovations reflecting large pieces of market news these shocks are identified from the data as being bigger in absolute terms than the values of two threshold parameters of the model one for the negative shocks and one for the positive shocks the model can be employed to investigate different sources of stock market volatility shifts driven by market news without relying on exogenous information in addition to this it has a number of interesting features which enable us to study the effects of large return shocks on future levels of market volatility the above properties of the model are shown based on a study for the us stock market volatility

time and frequency dynamics of connectedness between renewable energy stocks and crude oil prices abstract this paper examines the time and frequency dynamics of connectedness among stock prices of u s clean energy companies crude oil prices and a number of key financial variables using the methodology developed by barunik and krehlik 2018 this approach allows measuring the dynamics of return and volatility connectedness over time and across frequencies simultaneously the empirical results show that most of return and volatility connectedness is generated in the very short term i e movements up to five days while the long term plays a minor role our analysis further reveals a greater degree of interconnectedness across crude oil and financial markets since the onset of the u s subprime mortgage crisis in summer of 2007 consistent with the view of a global re pricing of risk triggered by the recent worldwide financial crisis crude oil prices do not appear as a key driver of the stock market performance of renewable energy companies in the short term or the long term which suggests a decoupling of the alternative energy industry from the traditional energy market moreover crude oil prices are a net receiver of financial shocks supporting the financialization of the commodity markets since the early 2000s in addition a significant pairwise connectedness is found mainly in the short term between clean energy and technology stock prices indicating that these two types of stocks are perceived by investors as similar assets these results can have important practical implications for investors and policy makers with different time horizons

this is what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract many of the quarterly oil price increases observed since 1985 are corrections to even bigger oil price decreases the previous quarter when one looks at the net increase in oil prices over the year recent data are consistent with the historical correlation between oil shocks and recessions

correlations and volatility spillovers between oil prices and the stock prices of clean energy and technology companies abstract in this paper multivariate garch models are used to model conditional correlations and to analyze the volatility spillovers between oil prices and the stock prices of clean energy companies and technology companies four different multivariate garch models bekk diagonal constant conditional correlation and dynamic conditional correlation are compared and contrasted the dynamic conditional correlation model is found to fit the data the best and generates results showing that the stock prices of clean energy companies correlate more highly with technology stock prices than with oil prices on average a 1 long position in clean energy companies can be hedged for 20 cents with a short position in the crude oil futures market

the dynamic connectedness of uk regional property returns in this study we examine the network topology of uk regional property returns over the period 1973q4 2014q4 using a dynamic measure of connectedness developed by diebold and yilmaz 2014 overall

commodity prices interest rates and the dollar this paper sheds light on recent fluctuations in commodity prices we investigate whether a decline in real interest rates and the us dollar contributes to higher commodity prices and whether commodity prices display overshooting behavior in response to changes in real interest rates we analyze the behavior of real prices of crude oil food metals and industrial raw materials the analysis is based on structural var models estimated on quarterly data over the period 1990q1 2007q4 our results suggest that commodity prices increase significantly in response to reductions in real interest rates moreover oil prices and prices of industrial raw materials tend to display overshooting behavior in response to such interest rate changes the evidence also suggests that a weaker dollar leads to higher commodity prices shocks to interest rates and the dollar are found to account for substantial shares of fluctuations in commodity prices

uncertainty and crude oil returns we use a copula approach to investigate the effect of uncertainty on crude oil returns using copulas to construct multivariate distributions of time series data permit the calculation of the dependence structure between the series independently of the marginal distributions further we implement the copula estimation using a rolling window method to allow for a time varying effect of equity and economic policy uncertainty on oil returns the results show that higher uncertainty as measured by equity and economic policy uncertainty indices significantly increase crude oil returns only during certain periods of time that is we find a positive dependence prior to the financial crisis and great recession interestingly estimation of the copula over the entire sample period leads to a negative dependence between the equity and economic policy indices and the crude oil return

stock prices of clean energy firms oil and carbon markets a vector autoregressive analysis recent discussions of energy security and climate change have attracted significant attention to clean energy we hypothesize that rising prices of conventional energy and or placement of a price on carbon emissions would encourage investments in clean energy firms the data from three clean energy indices show that oil prices and technology stock prices separately affect the stock prices of clean energy firms however the data fail to demonstrate a significant relationship between carbon prices and the stock prices of the firms

is there dependence and systemic risk between oil and renewable energy stock prices abstract we study systemic risk and dependence between oil and renewable energy markets using copulas to characterize the dependence structure and to compute the conditional value at risk as a measure of systemic risk we found significant time varying average and symmetric tail dependence between oil returns and several global and sectoral renewable energy indices our evidence on systemic risk indicates that oil price dynamics significantly contributes around 30 to downside and upside risk of renewable energy companies these results have important implications for risk management and renewable energy policies

spatial effects in econometric practice in environmental and resource economics this paper reviews some methodological and practical issues that arise in the use of spatial econometric techniques in empirical research in environmental and resource economics the focus is on four issues that do not always receive sufficient attention in applied work the statistical implications of using spatially interpolated values in the rhs of models the issue of spatial scale and spatial aggregation the conceptualization of spatial variation in a continuous or discrete space and the modeling of dependence as simultaneous or conditional spatial effects in econometric practice in environmental and resource economics introduction recent years have seen a tremendous increase in the application of geographic information systems and spatial analysis in the social sciences in general goodchild et al 2000 and in applied research in environmental and resource economics in particular bockstael 1996 such research is often characterized by the need to combine data obtained from different sources using different sample designs aggregation conventions and reporting frequencies for example economic variables such as house and land values and the type and volume of agricultural production are collected by means of censuses and surveys designed to accurately portray the distribution of the variable in the population of interest this population pertains to economic agents or aggregates thereof which are typically conceptualized as discrete distinct objects but rarely envisaged in an explicit spatial context in contrast environmental characteristics are often obtained from physical measurements that result from an underlying spatial sampling design examples are satellite imagery used to estimate land use and land cover and readings from sensors at fixed air and water quality monitoring stations the sampling design used for these measures may be optimized to estimate the distribution of the physical phenomenon such as air quality as a spatial continuum or field but has little connection to the framework used to collect economic information in addition neither economic nor physical data collection necessarily matches the spatial scale of the phenomenon under study such as the geographic extent of a market this is a level of complexity that goes well beyond the traditional micro macro distinction in economic analysis the scale mismatch and the inherent need to integrate data from various

location and uptake integrated household and gis analysis of technology adoption and land use with application to smallholder dairy farms in kenya abstract gis derived measures of location and space have increasingly been used in models of land use and ecology however they have made few inroads into the literature on technology adoption in developing countries which continues to rely mainly on survey derived information location with all its dimensions of market access demographics and agro climate nevertheless remains key to understanding potential for technology use the measures of location typically used in the adoption literature such as locational dummy variables that proxy a range of locational factors now appear relatively crude given the increased availability of more explicit gis derived measures this paper attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of integrating gis measures into analysis of technology uptake for better differentiating and understanding locational effects a set of gis derived measures of market access and agro climate are included in a standard household model of technology uptake applied to smallholder dairy farms in kenya using a sample of 3330 geo referenced farm households the three technologies examined are keeping of dairy cattle planting of specialised fodder and use of concentrate feed logit estimations are conducted that significantly differentiate effects of individual household characteristics from those related to location the predicted values of the locational variables are then used to make spatial predictions of technology potential comparisons are made with estimations based only on survey data which demonstrate that while overall explanatory power may not improve with gis derived variables the latter yield more practical interpretations which is further demonstrated through predictions of technology uptake change with a shift in infrastructure policy although requiring large geo referenced data sets and high resolution gis layers the methodology demonstrates the potential to better unravel the multiple effects of location on farmer decisions on technology and land use