bounded price variation and rational expectations in endogenous switching model of the u s corn market a model that includes bounded price variation and rational expectations by producers is estimated for the u s corn market the resulting model specification is highly nonlinear though since the probability of market equilibrium must be determined endogenously unlike previous research the cross equation restrictions implied by the rational expectations hypothesis are incorporated in the bounded prices model by using fair and taylor s 1983 procedure for obtaining maximum likelihood estimates of nonlinear rational expectations models the resulting model is compared against a standard equilibrium model with naive expectations the results show the bounded prices model is a superior specification copyright 1989 by mit press

the j curve effect and the u s agricultural trade balance according to the j curve theory following a currency depreciation there will be an initial deterioration of the trade balance before an improvement is realized this paper finds empirical evidence indicating the first segment of the j curve does exist for the u s agricultural trade balance a 10 depreciation of the u s dollar is estimated to lead a deterioration of the agricultural trade balance that will last for about nine months

econometric developments in agricultural and resource economics the first 100 years this article reviews the major contributions of agricultural and resource economists in the area of econometrics over the past 100 years early on a number of agricultural economists were in on the ground floor in terms of developing new econometric methods over time as the economics profession became more empirically oriented agricultural and resource economists increasingly assumed the role of early adopters of new econometric methods even so agricultural and resource economists continue to make useful modifications to econometric techniques in order to adapt the methods to the unique nature of the problems and applications that we study

price formation in commodity markets this paper develops a theory consistent market model for storable commodities and illustrates its characterization of the data generating process for a set of major traded commodities the dynamics of the system incorporate recent advances in modelling techniques cointegrated variables in the demand functions are represented by the error correction mechanism ecm and expected prices in the stock demand relationship are generated by a rational expectations process the outside sample performance of the model is tested against the pure time series model used to formulate expected prices and is shown to have a smaller mean square error than that of the time series model thus the model provides comparatively efficient forecasts and unlike models constructed in their reduced form permits consideration of key behavioural relationships in commodity markets

imports and the supply of winter tomatoes an application of rational expectations a model of the florida tomato industry is formulated under the hypothesis that growers make production decisions as rational economic agents this assumption implies that anticipated mexican tomato imports as well as other economic variables are taken into account when the planting decision is made maximum likelihood estimation methods are used to solve the simultaneous equations model and the implications of the model s reduced form are analyzed the empirical findings are consistent with the rational expectations hypothesis that producers respond to market information in its entirety when making acreage decisions key vwords expectations imports mexico rational expectations supply response tomatoes florida produces about 90 of u s tomatoes harvested for fresh use during the november to mid june season since the cuban trade embargo of february 1962 mexico has become the major foreign supplier of fresh winter tomatoes the total fresh winter tomato market in the united states has been almost equally shared by florida and mexico in recent years the rivalry for this market reached the point in 1978 that florida growers charged that mexican producers were dumping their product on the u s market schmitz firch hillman many florida growers suggest that unless mexican tomato imports are limited the florida tomato industry will effectively disappear primary attention in this paper is focused on domestic tomato acreage allocations in light of the mexican influence on the winter tomato market the paper does not attempt to evaluate the welfare effects of mexican imports on the florida tomato industry in addition to the emphasis on acreage response the domestic quantity and price effects are also considered most efforts to explain acreage devoted to agricultural crops have utilized some variant of a cobweb model because the ultimate price of the crop cannot be ascertained until the completion of the production cycle nevertheless if the supply and demand framework is truly representative of the way the market works an alternative to lagged price for representing the anticipated price for the crop is the price prediction of the supply and demand model itself thus acreage would be dependent on the expected price of the crop and expected price would result from the solution of the supply and demand model for price on the basis of information available at planting time the underlying hypothesis is that producers are acting in accordance with the information available to them at planting time and in a way represented by the interaction in the supply and demand model viewed in this way planted acreage decisions would be based on such factors as anticipated mexican imports and their attendant effect on the price of tomatoes one distinction between this and the traditional cobweb framework is that in the latter case lagged imports may influence planted acreage via their effect on lagged prices but any impact expected imports might have on current price is ignored in the acreage

expectations supply response and marketing boards an example from kenya whether farmers form price expectations adaptively or in a forward looking manner has implications for supply response analysis and for the implementation of agricultural policy reform this paper examines the formation of price expectations by kenyan export crop farmers who market their produce through a monopsonistic parastatal the analysis allows for relaxation of the small country assumption within a rational expectations framework production behavior is consistent with expectations of future prices based on indicators of aggregate supply and of the marketing board s purchasing capacity the finding that price forecasts may be formed using information other than previous price levels implies that marketing reforms that raise prices may not raise the relevant price expectations to elicit a positive supply response market reforms should be sensitive to farmers interpretation of institutional signals as well as previous prices

consistent estimation of a disequilibrium model of primary commodity price adjustment 1990 consistent estimation of a disequilibrium model of primary commodity price adjustment applied economics vol 22 no 10 pp 1417 1426

acreage decisions under risk the case of corn and soybeans an acreage supply response model is developed under expected utility maximization the resulting framework is used to specify and estimate a system of risk responsive acreage equations for corn and soybeans in the united states particular attention is given to the truncation effects of government price supports on the distribution of corn and soybean prices also a wealth variable is included in the acreage equations the empirical results indicate that risk and wealth variables play an important role in cornsoybean acreage decisions the analysis also shows that cross commodity risk reduction is important in acreage allocation decisions

estimation of dynamic nonlinear rational expectations models of primary commodity markets with stochastic dynamic programming and disequilibrium maximum likelihood methods are combined to estimate a dynamic nonlinear rational expectations model of a market for a storable primary commodity the estimation model captures the inherently nonlinear structure of private stockholding dynamics the disequilibrium effects of government buffer stock intervention and the impact of price expectations and risk on private supply and stockholding decisions copyright 1993 by mit press

the human development index yet another redundant composite development indicator abstract in its human development report 1990 the united nations development program undp proposes yet another composite indicator of development levels the human development index hdi the hdi assesses intercountry development levels on the basis of three so called deprivation indicators life expectancy adult literacy and the logarithm of purchasing power adjusted per capita gdp using simple statistical analysis this paper questions both the composition of the hdi and its usefulness as a new index of development it concludes that the hdi is both flawed in its composition and like a number of its predecessors fails to provide insights into intercountry development level comparisons which preexisting indicators including gnp per capita alone cannot

evaluating alternative price expectation models for multiproduct supply analysis abstract neoclassical economic theory provides an important conceptual framework for the analysis of agricultural production theory provides little guidance however in the actual specification of empirical models this paper applies an integrated approach for choosing between price expectation mechanisms in a multiple equation model when the alternatives are non nested nine alternative specifications of market price and policy information are developed price forecasting accuracy non nested tests of hypotheses and out of sample predictive accuracy are examined for agricultural production in iowa the results call into question the reliability of using forecasting accuracy as the sole guide to selecting a price expectation proxy

exchange rate risk and u s agricultural trade flows this paper analyzes the effect of exchange rate risk on u s agricultural trade flows a model which incorporates exchange rate risk is applied to ten countries while exchange rate risk was not significant in the seven developed markets results indicate that the exchange rate variable adversely affected u s agricultural exports to the three developing countries used in the analysis these findings underscore the importance of exchange rate risk in developing countries trading behavior issues such as establishment of well developed financial and commodity markets in developing countries must be addressed in future research

exploring the regional implications of interstate quarantine policies in western australia abstract as a signatory of the world trade organization agreement australia has a responsibility to ensure the behaviour of its internal markets for food and food related products abide by the same rules and regulations as international trade this has generated a need to demonstrate the validity of any measures that restrict competition to avoid disputes and or retaliatory actions by other signatories this paper explores a spatial economic evaluation technique that can be used to examine the welfare implications of quarantine policies for regionalised industries and demonstrates practical application of this technique using two case studies of interstate trade within australia

macroeconomic policy impacts on united states agriculture a simulation analysis abstract united states monetary and fiscal policies influence the domestic agricultural economy directly and through international linkages indirectly this study estimates the magnitude and statistical influence of coefficients relating u s macroeconomic policy to the u s agricultural economy through domestic and foreign markets specific objectives are to specify and estimate a general equilibrium quarterly econometric model of the u s macroeconomy and simulate the impact of federal deficit spending on real interest rates real exchange rates and net exports of agricultural products three hypotheses were tested the first hypothesis that an increase in federal deficit spending increases the real interest rate could not be rejected a 100 billion reduction in the u s deficit was estimated to reduce real interest rates by two percentage points or more the second hypothesis that an increase in real interest rate increases the real value of the u s dollar in foreign exchange markets had strong support and could not be rejected a third hypothesis that a rise in the real value of the dollar reduces net exports of u s farm products also could not be rejected results indicate that the u s agriculture would benefit from the lower exchange value associated with an optimal macroeconomic policy that policy initially made the overall u s economy perform less satisfactorily but that performance improves over time

a rational expectations model for the poultry sector in greece poultry meat production became systematic and business oriented from 1960 onwards especially during the period 1965 75 meat production showed a marked rise being increased nearly fivefold as a result of this increase in production greece has reached self sufficiency levels covering about 20 of total meat production compared to 7 in the early 1960s so far very little work has been done in analysing the rational expectations hypothesis in the context of a market model in this paper an attempt is made to examine the rational expectations hypothesis for the poultry meat sector within the framework of a simultaneous equations model that describes the factors affecting demand and supply as well as the link between farmers prices and consumers prices moreover in this study a rational expectations mechanism is integrated into the model and the hypothesis is tested it may be noted that poultry is a characteristic case of the operation of free market forces the structural equations of the model are e

risk behavior and rational expectations in the u s broiler market this study examines the empirical implications of extending the rational expectations hypothesis reh to include price uncertainty a general estimation framework that incorporates both the restrictions on structural parameters and the variance covariance terms is developed garch time series processes are used to generate time varying expectations of both the means and the variances of exogenous variables the empirical application is with a quarterly model of the u s broiler industry the results indicate that the rational expectation of price variance is an important determinant of broiler supply a formal test indicates that the restrictions implied by the reh cannot be rejected

european banking distress and emu institutional and macroeconomic risks financial stability in europe has received renewed attention with the advent of emu this paper examines whether eu country banking systems are particularly vulnerable to systemic risk our approach is to explore episodes of banking sector distress for a large sample of countries highlighting the experience of the eu we estimate multivariate probit models linking the likelihood of banking problems to a set of macroeconomic variables and institutional characteristics such as aspects of bank supervision and regulation restrictions on bank portfolios and development of the banking system given these characteristics the model predicts a low probability of banking sector distress in emu countries

how much of commodity price behavior can a rational expectations storage model explain a rational expectations competitive storage model was applied to the u s corn market to assess the aptness of this framework in explaining monthly price behavior in an actual commodity market relative to previous models extensive realism was added to the model in terms of how production activities and storage costs are specified by modeling convenience yield backwardation in prices between crop years did not depend on the unrealistic assumption of zero ending stocks our model generated cash prices that were distributed with positive skewness and kurtosis and mean and variance that increased over the storage season comparable to the persistence and the occasional spikes observed in commodity prices futures prices were generated as conditional expectations of cash prices at contract maturity and the variances of futures prices exhibited realistic time to maturity and seasonal patterns model realizations of cash and futures prices over many years were used to demonstrate the wide variety of price behaviors that could be observed in an efficient market with a similar market structure implying that economic and policy implications drawn from short historical samples of prices could be misleading

dynamic equilibrium in markets for perennial crops a dynamic equilibrium model for perennial crop markets is formulated price expectations are formed according to perfect foresight and both the age composition of the crop and the optimal rotation are determined endogenously the model is applied to the california alfalfa market the calculated long run equilibrium acreage is quite close to average acreage over the base period the results also exhibit cyclical fluctuations in acreage with a six percent coefficient of variation thus cyclical behavior can arise from technical characteristics of the production process as well as from imperfectly formed expectations or random exogenous shocks

agricultural export dumping the case of mexican winter vegetables in the u s market this paper examines the 1978 agricultural dumping charge brought by florida winter vegetable producers against mexican growers it discusses fair value in the context of three antidumping criteria prices at home and abroad selling below cost of production and third market test the u s department of commerce found in favor of the mexican producers by using the third market test a test which leads to ambiguous results it is the authors contention that the law should be changed so that future cases can be decided on a normal business practice concept accounting for production and costing decisions unique to highly perishable products

u s mexican trade in winter vegetables and illegal immigration this paper presents an integrated approach to u s mexican trade in a labor intensive commodity fresh winter tomatoes and illegal immigration of agricultural labor a seven equation econometric model is developed that includes excess demand u s import and supply mexican export equations for fresh winter tomatoes u s demand and mexican supply equations for apprehensible individuals intercountry price and wage relationship equations and a u s border patrol apprehension effort equation the empirical results indicate that both u s and mexico economic conditions affect the number of apprehended illegal mexican aliens the results also indicate that immigration and trade policies affect apprehensions

rational expectations in limited dependent variable models abstract the appropriate characterizations of rational expectations solutions in one limit and two limit models are derived we prove the existence and uniqueness of the rational expectations solution for each model our analysis is general without imposing serial independence and the parametric distributional assumption

bounded price variation models with rational expectations and price risk abstract the bounded price variation model under rational expectations is extended to include higher moments of price in the supply equation the resulting framework is then used to estimate a disequilibrium model of the u s corn market that includes price risk

paying politicians theory and evidence this paper looks at the theory behind the idea that paying politicians better will improve their performance the paper lays out a political agency model with adverse selection and moral hazard where politicians are subject to two period term limits this model provides a number of predictions about how the pay of politicians affects agency problems we also consider what happens when the pool of politicians is endogenous the main ideas in the model are confronted with data on u s governors jel d72 j33

the effects of uncertainty and adjustment costs on investment in the almond industry a neoclassical model of investment behavior is developed wherein firms are assumed to maximize the expected present value of net revenue under leontief technology prices and yields are assumed to be stochastic this framework yields investment as a function of the expected present value of the output from one unit of capital and the variance of the expected value this theory is applied to investment in the almond industry the model outperforms both a model without uncertainty and one with neither uncertainty nor adjustment costs using in sample and out of sample tests copyright 1989 by mit press

program enrollment and acreage response to reforestation cost sharing programs five alternative sets of predictions are presented of the total acreage of southern pine that would have been planted after clear cut harvest if existing government forest improvement programs had made different levels of cost sharing available to nonindustrial private forest owners the predictions illustrate the importance of separating and accounting for both the number of tracts enrolled and for the size of enrolled tracts predictions are obtained from a profit maximization model that represents the owner s decision as a simultaneous choice of reforestation practice and size of tract to harvest and reforest

human development revisited a new undp report abstract the undp s first annual human development report is reviewed and discussed the report introduces a new index the human development index hdi as a counter to measures of national income such as gdp measuring development of countries with the aid of this index gives a significantly different ordering to one based on gnp per capita this point is not disputed although success on the index is not a necessary and sufficient condition for success in terms of rapid economic growth as is shown by the case of sri lanka nevertheless the report is welcome for its attention to human development issues for its useful statistical annex and for its observation that the poverty of the people of the developing world has been no barrier to the affluence of their armies

credit constraints interest rates and agricultural prices although there are some earlier contributions the paper by schuh the exchange rate and u s agriculture touched off a controversy within the agricultural economics profession that has yet to be resolved in its original form the controversy centered around whether or not exchange rates had a significant effect on u s agricultural prices exports and farm income later the argument seems to have moved one step further back along the logical line to a question of whether or not monetary phenomena can have real effects thus to some extent agricultural economists interested in this issue have polarized themselves into two camps that closely resemble what for lack of a better term might be called keynesians and non keynesians this paper is not an attempt to settle this dispute indeed if observations based on developments in macroeconomics offer any guide i think that the dispute is based upon such fundamentally different perceptions of the world that no single paper or series of papers will ever settle the issue rather in this paper i want to discuss what i perceive to be one of the key issues in this debate are agricultural prices more flexible than nonagricultural prices my choice of this topic is somewhat personal and i choose it mainly because i feel that if monetary variables are going to have real effects these effects can only be short run in nature and are best explained by differential price adjustments the argument is simple suppose you have two goods a and b and suppose that good a is priced administratively a la gardiner means while good b s price is perfectly flexible now suppose further that the money supply is artificially inflated in the current instances the price of a will not adjust instantaneously while the price of b is free to adjust if the price of b does adjust as a result of an increase in the money s pply then manipulation of the money supply has caused a real change since the price ratio between a and b changes in this case therefore we can also expect other real changes in the economy but such effects should be only short run in nature the real effects set in motion by the relative price change should ultimately be self correcting under the usual ceteris paribus assumptions since even administered prices have to adjust in the long run to maintain entrepreneurial profitability however even if such issues of relative flexibility are not a central element in the discussion that is germane to the present paper and the associated controversy the general belief that agricultural prices are more flexible than nonagricultural prices is firmly rooted in the stylized facts of agricultural economics moreover the high degree of instability of agricultural prices is often given as the primary argument for extensive government interference in the agricultural economy in what follows i will first offer a brief survey of some of the studies of the effects of monetary phenomena on u s agricultural prices exports and incomes in this part of the paper i specifically exclude papers of what i think of as the is inflation neutral with

modeling expectations of bounded prices an application to the market for corn the presence of farm programs should directly affect the expectations of producers this paper analyzes the formation of price expectations when price supports constitute an effective lower bound on the distribution of the expectations we first investigate what the expected price would be if the usual rational expectations formula is used this leads to a relationship that is not estimable we suggest two alternatives one based on a tobit approximation and the other based on a perfect prediction of when the support is going to be effective using a simplified model of the u s corn market the methodology is demonstrated and compared to an alternative method of using futures prices as the expectation of harvest price the analysis of supply response for the major u s field crops is made difficult due to government intervention in these markets this intervention has been characterized by the use of price supports acreage diversion storage incentives etc during the last thirty years many studies have analyzed producer behavior in the presence of governmental involvement such studies have typically been concerned with modeling the effect of supports and diversions in an ex post sense rather than with how producers used the knowledge of farm programs to form their expectations if producers are rational economic agents their expectations of harvest prices should be conditioned both by free market forces and the type and degree of governmental intervention in the market of course farm programs have varied in nature and extent during the past thirty years and it is doubtful that any structural model could capture their complexities in this paper we attempt to introduce rational expectations in a simplified model of the u s corn market in essence we focus on the formation of price expectations when price supports constitute an effective lower bound on the distribution of the expectations we proceed by developing a theoretical model that connects the rational expectations model with a model of bounded price variation it is shown that one representation that may characterize the corn market is a triangular structural system with endogenous switching a full information maximum likelihood estimator is proposed for the system next an empirical model is specified and estimated the model is evaluated in comparison to an augmented model that contains a futures price so that some inferences may be made concerning the rational expectations model s success in summarizing relevant market information expectations under bounded prices consider a market that may be represented by a simple supply and demand system q a pt a2w el supply function pt b qt b2xt e2t demand function 1 where p and q represent market price and quantity w and x represent supply and demand shifters and p represents the rational expectation of product price at the time production decisions are made note that this system has a familiar recursive structure when the expected price variable is specified in terms of one or more lagged prices when the restricted reduced form of the structural system is solved for in terms of the expected price and this expression is used to replace pj wallis 1980 then models similar to those of goodwin and sheifrin 1982 and shonkwiler and emerson 1982

optimal wages for politicians i consider a society that has to decide on the wage that it offers for an elected official potential candidates differ in their abilities which determines their effectiveness in office and their opportunity cost they consider the wage when deciding whether to enter as candidates and if they do how hard to campaign the remuneration for the official that maximizes ordinary citizens expected utility is a function of the proportion of competent voters who are better informed about the quality of the candidates and are not influenced by the campaign i use the data on u s governor salaries over six decades to evaluate some implications of the model specifically the proportion of the state s population with a bachelor s degree a proxy for the proportion of competent voters is negatively correlated with the governors salaries when controlled for other factors

limited dependent rational expectations models with stochastic thresholds abstract this paper extends the standard limited dependent rational expectations model to allow for stochastic variations in the bounds we show that the degree of non linearity relating expectations to fundamentals tends to decline as the band becomes less predictable monte carlo experiments indicate that the assumption that the band is perfectly predictable by the agents when inappropriate can seriously bias the estimates and the inferences based on them

the expectations hypothesis of the term structure when interest rates are close to zero abstract in an economy where cash can be stored costlessly in nominal terms the nominal interest rate is bounded below by zero this paper derives the implications of this non negativity constraint for the term structure and shows that it induces a nonlinear and convex relation between short and long term interest rates the long term rate responds asymmetrically to changes in the short term rate and by less than that is predicted by the benchmark linear model in particular a decrease in the short term rate produces a smaller response in the long term rate than an increase of the same magnitude the empirical predictions of the model are examined using data from japan

the econometrics of markets with quantity controls this paper presents econometric methods for single markets with quantity controls or quotas a theory of quotas based on disequilibrium bargaining nations is outlined maximum likelihood methods are described for these theories the methods are applied to the australian tobacco leaf market it is argued that cigarette manufacturers gain slightly more from bargaining proces than tobacco growers

a structural time series analysis of us broiler exports abstract a structural time series model is used to determine the dynamic characteristics forecasting properties and policy implications of factors affecting the us broiler export market the emphasis is on international market responsiveness the analysis indicates that in addition to the explanatory variables a trend component has been vital in the expansion of the broiler industry during the study period the results indicate that export markets are more price responsive than the domestic markets that interventions in the canadian and mexican markets reduce their imports and exchange rate changes have significant impacts on us exports

autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity in commodity spot prices muth s 1961 rational expectations model of commodity markets implies that inventory carryover creates arch processes in prices the model also indicates that the expected price variance is an explanatory variable in price regressions hypotheses were tested on price data of twenty commodities using a variation of engle et al 1987 arch m technique an arch process was found in storable and not in non storable commodity data as expected however changes in expected price variance have no significant impact on price copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

methods of estimation for models of markets with bounded price variation introduction there has been a considerable amount of literature on the estimation of models which are in disequilibrium see fair and jaffe 1972 fair and kelejian 1974 amemiya 1974 maddala and nelson 1974 goldfeld and quandt 1975 laffont and garcia 1977 bowden 1978 etc the main feature of these models is that there is a demand function a supply function a min condition and in some models a price adjustment equation the cornerstone equation in these models is q1 min d1 s where d t quantity demanded at time t s t quantity supplied at time t q t quantity transacted at time t this equation which says that the short side of the market always prevails separates the sample points into those belonging to demand and those belonging to supply one can classify the models into two categories those with sample separation known and those with sample separation unknown but the important point is that the min condition implies under the usual assumptions that the probability of equilibrium is zero for any t however there are many practical cases where some of the observations refer to equilibrium points and some to disequilibrium points this is because trading in many markets is confined to some limits on price and the disequilibrium occurs only when these limits are violated there are minimum wage laws in labor markets usury laws in credit markets and trading limits in commodity markets in all such cases the markets are sometimes in equilibrium and sometimes in disequilibrium the present paper discusses methods of estimation for models of such markets

efficiency and formation of expectations evidence from the european investment survey the european commission conducts an annual survey regarding planned and realized business fixed investment across various manufacturing sectors in euroland in this study we investigate the predictive content of survey based expectations on investment in addition we empirically test the rationality of respondents both in a time series as well as in a panel context according to our results based on pooling the data efficiency is rejected since expectations are biased predictors of actual outcomes furthermore expectations revisions are found to be correlated with components of the information set known at the time of decision making finally our results qualify regressive expectations as the mechanism that more adequately describes the formation of expectations

a benefit cost analysis of u s agricultural trade promotion subsidies for nonprice export promotion can harm domestic consumers by increasing price in the domestic market and by diverting funds from domestic market promotion taking these consumer impacts into account we find that federal expenditures for nonprice export promotion of farm products may be too high

exchange rate effects on inputs and outputs in canadian agriculture in a seminal piece of work schuh demonstrates using a single market partial equilibrium model that exchange rates have a large impact on the price received for farm products he argued that the overvalued u s dollar reduced export demand and the domestic price of u s grains since then much of the work on estimating the impact of exchange rate changes on agriculture has implicitly assumed that inputs to the agricultural sector come from the nontraded sector we argue this assumption can result in an error in the estimation of the effects of exchange rates in an examination of the passthrough of changes in the us cdn exchange rate we find the data from 1975 to 1989 are consistent with the hypothesis of a complete passthrough of exchange rates for many important variable inputs to canadian agricultural production this analysis indicates that while exchange rates may have had significant impacts on the return to fixed factors and farm income they have had little effect on grain production in the case of livestock feeding in canada exchange rate devaluations may actually reduce production and reduce the return to fixed factors because inputs especially grain are more tradeable than outputs finally we examine the potential welfare impact on nontradeables such as land from changes in the exchange rate theoretical model

investment under uncertainty in dynamic conflicts this paper analyses a model in which two groups repeatedly compete with each other for a prize in every time period we assume that there is a status quo bias if there is a fight today yesterday s winner is in a stronger position than the other group hence a change of the status quo has long term consequences that groups need to take into account important applications of this model include lobbying for legislation and political transitions through revolutions we analyse the strategic timing of attacks on the status quo which is similar to investment decisions under uncertainty we find that the attack threshold is considerably lower than in a comparable one period game and that the expenditure level necessary to change the status quo is low in comparison to the prize this provides a possible solution to tullock s rent seeking paradox in lobbying copyright 2006 wiley blackwell

empirically testing the law of one price in an international commodity market a rational expectations application to the natural rubber market abstract the law of one price lop is an important ingredient in theories of international trade and exchange rate determination an important shortcoming of the existing empirical literature is that parity is typically assumed to hold contemporaneously this overlooks the fact that international commodity arbitrage takes place over time as well as across spatially separated markets recognizing this fact we expect to see parity holding for expected prices a model which incorporates the expectations of commodity arbitragers is constructed and used to test the lop in the natural rubber market results indicate that the inclusion of expectations may be of value when considering the lop

a heteroskedastic multivariate tobit analysis of price dynamics in the presence of price floors this article presents an econometric analysis of the effects of price floors on price dynamics and price volatility in a multimarket context we investigate the implications of a government price support program providing a censoring mechanism to the price determination process the analysis uses a dynamic multivariate tobit model under time varying volatility the model is applied to the u s dairy markets with a special focus on the effects of government price support programs in a period of market liberalization the econometric analysis provides useful information on the multimarket effects of price supports on price dynamics and price volatility

u s corn exports the role of the exchange rate abstract time series econometric methods are applied to monthly observational data over the period 1978 1992 on real exchange rates real corn prices corn export sales and corn export shipments for the united states in sample fit and out of sample forecast results are used to discern whether exchange rates have elicited systematic responses in u s corn prices sales and shipments and whether the dynamic transmission mechanisms tying these variables together have changed over time a structural break appears to have occurred in early 1985 no cointegration is found between exchange rates price sales and shipments in either sub period influences are all short run or between stationary variables the role of the exchange rate appears to have moderated in the post 1985 period implications for policy analysis are discussed

testing the rational expectations hypothesis in an agricultural market a recent survey on models of agricultural supply equations listed over 500 studies in which variants of nerlove s adaptive expectations model were employed one might naively assume that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly favored the adaptive expectations hypothesis but this inference would not be warranted in particular there have been very few studies which have even attempted to estimate a rational expectations version of the traditional agricultural supply models and none that have explicitly tested the rational expectations hypothesis 2 in this paper we estimate a model of agricultural supply and demand for the chicken broiler industry under the maintained assumption of rational expectations in the sense of muth 1961 and provide a series of tests of the model specification we find that in this case the hypothesis of muth rationality receives strong support in recent years there has been increasing interest in models in which economic actors are assumed to form expectations of variables rationally for the most part empirical applications of the rational expectations hypothesis have employed single equation econometric methods these methods have permitted consistent estimation of equations under the assumption of the rational expectations hypothesis but do not allow for any explicit testing of the maintained hypothesis of rationality this paper presents estimates of a simultaneous equation model of the chicken broiler industry using maximum likelihood methods and provides a joint test of the rational expectations hypothesis and the model specification our econometric procedure is related to the recent theoretical work of wallis 1980 and combines time series analysis with traditional econometric estimation techniques under the assumption of rational expectations the model can be solved for the expected price as a function of the expected values of the exogenous variables this function can then be substituted into the model leading to a specification which contains the original endogenous and exogenous variables plus the expected values of the exogenous variables in general following this substitution the model will contain overidentifying restrictions time series analysis is utilized to generate the necessary forecasts of the exogenous variables the complete system of equations is estimated by full information maximum likelihood and the constraints are tested by a log likelihood ratio test the overidentifying constraints arise in the model because the suppliers are assumed to act as if they know both the underlying structure of the model and the stochastic processes governing the exogenous variables the two requirements of rational expectations while the expected price enters only the supply equation of our model it is necessary in the econometric formulation to specify the demand equation the instrumental variable procedures of mccallum 1976 and nelson 1975b are single equation methods and do not permit a test of the rational expectations hypothesis by specifying the complete model the additional structure imposed on the problem allows us to estimate the coefficients and test the implied restrictions there has not been universal agreement that the rational expectations hypothesis is the best theoretical device to model rational behavior according to muth s original formulation economic actors forecast endogenous variables according to the true reduced form equations of the model decanio 1979 and friedman 1979 have argued that the economic actors actually received for publication august 24 1981 revision accepted for publication march 2 1982 university of new mexico and university of california davis respectively we wish to thank g king r l huntzinger r pope and l wegge for advice on this project a nelson and e shaw contributed useful research assistance i the paper by askari and cummings 1977 provides references for these studies 2 huntzinger s 1979 paper is one of the first attempts at estimatitng a rational expectations model of agricultural supply

pay for politicians and candidate selection an empirical analysis abstract a growing theoretical literature on the effect of politicians salaries on the average level of skills of political candidates yields ambiguous predictions in this paper we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on the level of education of parliamentary candidates we take advantage of an exceptional reform where the salaries of finnish mps were increased by 35 in the year 2000 intended to make the pay for parliamentarians more competitive a difference in differences analysis using candidates in municipal elections as a control group suggests that the higher salary increased the fraction of candidates with higher education among female candidates while we find no significant effect for male candidates

responsiveness of rural and urban land uses to land rent determinants in the u s south ricardian and von thunen land rent models are combined into a single land use share model including farm forest and urban land uses the land share model is applied to the southern united states and elasticities are extracted that measure land share response to changes in population income land values prices and costs in counties with different degrees of urbanizationt he study explores the effect of treating either rural or urban land as a residual use while this practice is common in existing land use studies it is found to significantly affect parameter estimates in this county level analysis

a multimarket bounded price variation model under rational expectations corn and soybeans in the united states the bounded prices model under rational expectations is extended to a multimarket setting because the resulting rational expectations model is highly nonlinear fair and taylor s iterative procedure is employed in conjunction with the multimarket framework to obtain maximum likelihood estimates of a supply demand model for corn and soybeans the estimated model is then used to simulate the market equilibrium effects associated with removing price support and acreage set aside programs over the sample period among other things the results reveal that acreage set asides have dominated the induced supply effects of price support programs for corn

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

composite indices of physical quality of life basic needs fulfilment and income a principal component representation abstract in the context of international comparisons the multivariate method of principal components is suggested for computing composite indices of economic development that capture per capita income basic needs fulfilment and other possible indicators of well being the method is conceptually appealing easy to apply and seems promising in several directions two illustrative applications are given one develops a composite index based on the three pqli constituents and per capita gnp for 147 countries in the other a composite index of basic needs fulfilment is first computed for 82 countries and then a more inclusive measure that also takes account of per capita gnp is derived

effects of exchange rate changes on u s agriculture a dynamic analysis an econometric model of the wheat corn and soybean markets is used to examine the dynamic effects of exchange rate fluctuation on u s commodity markets exports and agricultural prices are found to be sensitive to movements in the exchange rate while domestic factors such as disappearance and inventories are less sensitive but still responsive dramatic short run adjustments in prices and exports are followed by less dramatic but significant longer run adjustments thus the hypothesis of elastic response to the exchange rate seems particularly relevant for the short run

an empirical examination of the link between monetary policy and us agricultural commodity exports 1989 an empirical examination of the link between monetary policy and us agricultural commodity exports applied economics vol 21 no 2 pp 155 173

on information and market dynamics the case of the u s beef market abstract the paper investigates the nature of dynamic prices and expectations in a competitive market the approach is applied to the u s beef market which exhibits cyclical patterns and significant biological lags in the production process beef price equations are estimated under different expectation regimes the empirical results indicate the presence of heterogeneous price expectations with a significant number of market participants neglecting information about the existence of a beef cycle

methods of estimation for models of markets with bounded price variation under rational expectations abstract the present paper extends the analysis in an earlier paper by maddala on estimation of disequilibrium market models with controlled prices to the case where the supply function depends on expected prices and expectations are formed rationally as suggested by muth

were the peseta exchange rate crises forecastable during target zone period during the 1990s several fixed or quasi fixed exchange rate systems collapsed currency crises have happened in both developed and emerging countries so it is necessary to forecast and avoid them however financial market crises have been extremely difficult to forecast economic agents expectations are nonobservable variables that cannot be ignored in the models in addition if it is required to study the european case during the 1990s the censored disposition of the exchange rate cannot be ignored either a discrete time target zones model is proposed where these aspects are taken into account it will be tested in a peseta deutsche mark exchange rate framework from june 1989 to december 1998 the results indicate differences between before and after the shift in band widths in august 1993

a note on the estimation of limited dependent variable models under rational expectations abstract in this paper we derive the expressions for the expected price in a disequilibrium model with upper and lower limits on prices under rational expectation relaxing the assumption of perfect foresight made in earlier studies we prove the uniqueness of the solution to the rational expectations model and outline the estimation method and iterative procedure

analysis of exchange rate target zones using a limited dependent rational expectations model with jumps this article examines the exchange rate determination in a target zone regime when the bounds can be fixed for an extended period but are subject to occasional jumps in this case the behavior of the endogenous variable is affected by the agents expectations about both the occurrence and the size of the jump empirical results using data for the franc mark exchange rate provide support for the nonlinear model with time varying realignment probability and indicate that the agents correctly anticipated most of the observed changes in the central parity

exchange rate effects on the relationship between fdi and trade in the u s food processing industry the effect of exchange rates on international trade and more specifically on agricultural trade flows has been documented by several studies most studies agree that an appreciation depreciation in the value of the u s dollar hurts helps u s agricultural exports an appreciation of the u s dollar raises the cost of u s products to foreign buyers and reduces their purchases 2 although neglected early on the effect of exchange rate risk as measured by its volatility on trade flows was also found to be negative arize pick parallel to this literature were the devel

intraseasonal demand for fall potatoes under rational expectations an iterative numerical strategy combining maximum likelihood methods and stochastic dynamic programming is used to estimate a dynamic nonlinear rational expectations model of the u s fall potato market the model captures the essential processes governing the intraseasonal dynamics of potato consumption and storage including the impact of price expectations on stockholding decisions the model is used to analyze the temporal pattern of demand for fall potatoes

are politicians really paid like bureaucrats abstract we provide the first empirical analysis of gubernatorial pay using u s data for 1950 90 we document substantial variation in the wages of politicians both across states and over time gubernatorial wages respond to changes in state income per capita and taxes we estimate that governors receive a 1 percent pay cut for each 10 percent increase in per capita tax payments and a 4 5 percent increase in pay for each 10 percent increase in income per capita in their states there is evidence that the tax elasticity reflects a form of reward for performance the evidence for the income elasticity of pay is less conclusive but is suggestive of rent extraction motives finally we find that democratic institutions play an important role in shaping pay for example voter initiatives and the presence of political opposition significantly reduce the income elasticity of pay and increase tax elasticities of pay

price and quantity controlled agricultural markets and disequilibrium econometrics a survey abstract this survey reviews the literature on estimating single markets in disequilibrium in the presence of regulated price and or quantity controls e g minimum price regimes and or marketing quotas most of the literature is found to describe pure econometric technique with only a few applications having emerged to date various reasons for the broad non acceptance of this literature are offered including a perceived lack of realism proposals to close this econometric theory application gap are put forward including the use of effective demand concepts in specifying demand and supply functions synthesizing some closely related literature on agricultural price quantity controls with disequilibrium econometrics i e endogenous government policy and the effects controls have on yield uncertainty and price risk and outlining more applicable econometric technique extensions