Classic studies of spot price fluctuations for commodities like cotton and wheat have been interpreted using a power-law probability distribution with exponent alpha inside the Lévy-stable regime (0<alpha<2). In contrast price fluctuations for stocks have been interpreted using a power-law probability distribution with alpha outside the Lévy-stable regime suggesting that stock prices are in a d...

International trade of horticultural commodities is increasingly important in many regions of the world, yet import patterns of key horticultural crops are understudied in the agricultural economics literature. Using data between 1991 and 2005, we estimate the drivers of per capita import demand for six of the most highly traded horticultural commodities. The own price elasticity estimates were...

The development of risk management methodologies for non-gaussian markets relies often on the assumption that the underlying market factors have a gaussian distribution. While advances have been made in the modeling of more general marginal distributions of the risk factors, the modeling of non-gaussian dependence structures is much less advanced. For commodities markets that often exhibit sudd...

This paper presents the optimal strategic asset allocation for investors seeking to hedge inflation risk. Using a vector-autoregressive model, we investigate the optimal choice for an investor with a fixed target real return at different horizons, with shortfall probability constraint. We show that the strategic allocation differs sharply across regimes. In a volatile macroeconomic environment,...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the necessity to posit a specific utility function to describe investor's preferences and it does not impo...

INTRODUCTION Logistics management information system for health commodities remained poorly implemented in most of developing countries. To assess the status of laboratory logistics management information system for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis laboratory commodities in public health facilities in Addis Ababa. METHODS A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted from September 2010-January ...

The problems of developing country dependence on a narrow range of commodity exports are well-established. Many poorer developing countries have continued to generate a substantial proportion of their total export revenues from one or a small number of basic food commodities. In addition to the problem of declining world market prices for basic food products typically exported from developing c...

The multi-transshipment problem is NP-hard already for two commodities over bipartite networks. Nonetheless, using our recent theory of n-fold integer programming and extensions developed herein, we are able to establish the polynomial time solvability of the problem in two broad situations. First, for any fixed number of commodities and number of suppliers, we solve the problem over bipartite ...

This paper extends the previous literature on optimal redistributive taxation in the presence of externalities to a multi-externality setting. While taxes on income and on 'clean' commodities are still una ected by the externalities, which con rms previous results, I nd that the existence of more than one externality-generating commodity has important implications for the optimal Pigouvian tax ...

Probabilistic techniques were used to characterize dietary exposure of consumers to pesticides found in twelve commodities implicated as having the greatest potential for pesticide residue contamination by a United States-based environmental advocacy group. Estimates of exposures were derived for the ten most frequently detected pesticide residues on each of the twelve commodities based upon re...