the role of price risk in china s agricultural and fisheries exports to the us abstractthis article explores the effect of price risk on the us importers optimal allocation of agriculture imports between the major supplier china and other competing countries we first modify a demand system to account for the impacts of own price risk and cross price risk and then apply the model to 16 agricultural and fisheries commodities exported to the us the estimation results show that importers are sensitive to price risks of 14 chinese commodities comparisons between price risk trade relations of agricultural and fisheries products and between trade effects of cross price risk on chinese goods and substitutes provide strong evidence for explaining the observed trade patterns our study highlights the importance of price stability in promoting international trade especially from developing countries to developed countries

a model of homogenous input demand under price uncertainty this paper examines the empirical validity of a model of homogeneous input demand under price uncertainty in which firms trade off expected input cost against its variability risk in selecting the optimal input supplier mix using recent work in time series econometrics this model is applied to the japanese steam coal import market where five suppliers compete china the soviet union south africa the united states and australia copyright 1991 by american economic association

do employees sickness absences react to a change in costs for firms evidence from a natural experiment we analyse the impact of a social security reform that changed the costs incurred by firms due to sickness absences the reform abolished a compulsory insurance for firms which insured them against the wages paid to sick blue collar workers during the first year after its introduction we estimate that the reform resulted in about 6 3 percent fewer sickness absences and in about 8 6 percent fewer absence days we do not find evidence for changes in hiring or firing and we find only limited workforce composition changes we do not find spillover effects on the absences of white collar workers robustness checks confirm these results

consumer demand under price uncertainty empirical evidence from the market for cigarettes abstract we develop a demand model for goods that are subject to habit formation we show that consumption plans of forward looking individuals depend on preferences current period prices and ind

violence instability and trade evidence from kenya s cut flower sector summary we examine the implications of the violence and instability following the 2007 kenyan elections and how it affected cut flower trade between kenya and the eu using the rotterdam demand model we find that the post election violence had a negative impact on eu imports from kenya equivalent to 33 million which is significant given the importance of flowers to kenya s economy results show that even a short period of violence can have an effect on trade since instability in an exporting country causes importers to source from other countries perceived as less risky persisting even when order is restored

forward exchange rates and expectations during the 1920s a re examination of the evidence abstract the philips hansen fully modified wald test is used to analyze whether or not the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate for the 1920s daily data for five exchange rates german mark belgium franc french franc italian lira and us dollar versus the british pound are examined the results suggest that the forward unbiasedness hypothesis can be rejected in three belgium franc french franc and german mark out of the five currencies this result may be due to the presence of a risk premium for the belgian and french francs and to market failure in the case of the german mark the forward and future spot exchange rates are cointegrated jel f31

absenteeism in a medium sized manufacturing plant 1991 absenteeism in a medium sized manufacturing plant applied economics vol 23 no 1 pp 161 166

risk aversion and technology mix in an electricity market this article analyzes the eff ect of risk and risk aversion on the long term equilibrium technology mix in an electricity market it develops a model where fi rms can invest in baseload plants with a fi xed variable cost and peak plants with a random variable cost and demand for electricity varies over time but is perfectly predictable at equilibrium the electricity price is partly determined by the random variable cost and the returns from the two kinds of plants are negatively correlated when the variable cost of the peak technology is high the return of peak plants is low but the return to baseload plants is high risk averse fi rms reduce the capacity of the riskiest technology and develop the capacity of the other compared to risk neutral fi rms in the particular case where a risk neutral fi rm invests heavily in baseload technology and only sparely in peak capacity a risk averse fi rm would invest less in baseload increase peak capacity and increase total installed capacity

source diversification and import price risk in this article i present a theoretical framework and derive an empirical model that relates import price risk to the allocation of an import across exporting sources source diversification a differential approach to expected utility theory and firm demand is used to derive a model comparable to more popular demand systems such as the rotterdam and aids models the model is used in estimating carnation demand in the united kingdom results show that while total carnation imports expected prices and seasonality are important determinants of import demand by source there is significant information loss when price risk is not considered copyright 2012 oxford university press

the stochastic implications of rent maximization an application to stumpage rates for timber in british columbia we construct a model of rent maximizing behaviour by a single seller of timber in the absence of a formal market deriving the stochastic implications of rent maximization for timber prices stumpage rates when other input and output lumber prices are random subsequently we examine the model s ability to describe monthly time series stumpage rate data from british columbia canada between january 1979 and october 1999 deviations of stumpage rates from their long run trend are also structured by an error correction model which suggests that between 13 and 20 of period to period changes in stumpage rates can be explained by an equilibrium adjustment term copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

how much does absenteeism cost this paper presents evidence on the output loss resulting from absenteeism hedonic wage equations are estimated over two different data sets the 1972 1973 quality of employment survey and the pooled may 1973 1975 current population survey to calculate the cost in terms of reduced output and increased labor costs per payroll hour also a manufacturing production function is estimated to directly compute the productivity loss the results indicate that the effect of absenteeism on output is quite small a 10 percentage point increase in the absence rate is associated with at most a 2 1 percent decrease in the wage

how unions affect productivity in manufacturing plants this study investigates several hypotheses as to how unions may affect productivity analysis of data from 46 manufacturing plants for 1982 indicates a negative union impact on productivity the author finds evidence suggesting that unions reduce the effectiveness of some managerial practices undertaken to increase productivity and that a poor labor management relations climate also reduces productivity these two factors account for almost 50 percent of the negative union impact

tied wage hours offers and the endogeneity of wages in the standard model of labor supply each worker is a price taker where the relevant price is an hourly wage rate which is fixed in the short run and which does not depend upon the number of hours supplied with this basic assumption the wage can be regarded as exogenous for the purpose of estimating a labor supply function this paper proposes and implements a pair of tests for the exogeneity of wages in a longitudinal labor supply model and for the particular failure of exogeneity associated with jobs that offer wage hour packages the first test is very simple it amounts to a test of whether hours granger cause wages at the individual level the second test involves a simultaneous estimation of labor supply and wage offer equations both tests indicate that the offered wage is related to hours worked though the offer locus is for this sample very flat the principal conclusion is that labor supply equations cannot properly be estimated in isolation from the process generating wages even when long time series are available on a sample of individuals this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

energy and depletable resources economics and policy 1973 1998 abstract this paper reviews the impact of the literature in depletable resources and energy economics over the period 1973 1998 particularly the initial period of publication of the journal of environmental economics and management 1974 1998 a discussion of prominent policy issues in this arena is provided along with an indication of what academic economics papers have contributed to that debate this is followed by a citation analysis of contributions in the fields of energy and exhaustible resource economics for each of these two fields a list of the top papers in each five year period from 1974 to 1998 is presented along with a list of the top journals in each decade based on average citations per article the top ten cited articles in the fields in the journal of environmental economics and management are also presented

international politics and import diversification abstractthis paper examines how international politics affects trade in the absence of empires or wars we first show that deterioration of relations between the united states and another country measured by divergence in their united nations general assembly voting patterns reduced u s imports from that country during 1962 2000 though statistically significant the magnitude of the effect of political distance on trade is small indeed we show that except for petroleum and some chemical products u s imports are not affected by international politics american firms however diversify their oil imports significantly away from political opponents of the united states oil trade is often associated with backward vertical foreign direct investment that is subject to the expropriation risk in contrast to the usual claim that oil is a strategic commodity we provide suggestive evidence that trade in products when rents are appropriable is more likely to be affected by international politics

political oil import diversification by financial and commercial traders abstract international politics affects the oil trade but do financial and commercial traders who participate in spot oil trading also respond to changes in international politics we construct a firm level dataset for all u s oil importing companies over 1986 2008 to examine how these firms respond to increases in political distance between the u s and her trading partners measured by divergence in their un general assembly voting patterns consistent with previous macro evidence we first show that individual firms diversify their oil imports politically even after controlling for unobserved firm heterogeneity however the political pattern of oil imports is not entirely driven by the concerns of hold up risks which exist when oil transactions via term contracts are associated with backward vertical fdi that is subject to expropriation in particular our results indicate that even financial and commercial traders significantly reduce their oil imports from u s political enemies interestingly while these traders diversify their oil imports politically immediately after changes in international politics other oil companies reduce their oil imports with a significant time lag our findings suggest that in designing regulations to avoid harmful repercussions on commodity and financial assets policymakers need to understand the nature of political risk

an examination on the cost efficiency of the banking industry under multiple output prices uncertainty this article formulates a behavioural model of profit maximization which explicitly incorporates both multiple output prices risk and safety first practice this theoretical model is specifically suitable for investigating financial institutions whose output prices frequently encounter a variety of risks such as loan defaults arrears the sample banks are empirically found to be highly risk averse furthermore risk preferences exert little effect on the technical efficiency estimates whereas the same estimates obtained by the standard fixed effect model under certainty tend to be overestimated evidence is found that a specialized bank offering a single product with a larger scale of production will be preferable in an uncertain atmosphere