Bumper crops have quickly turned the corn and soybean price boom into a bust. Newcrop corn and soybean futures contracts are down 40 percent and 35 percent respectively in just a few short months. Of course, those farmers that had the foresight to lock in at high prices are completely unaffected by the drop in price. For them, market volatility has created profit opportunities. But all is not l...

The global electricity supply from non-hydro renewable energies, such as wind and solar, has being growing at a high rate, and it is expected that this trend persists. In China, Wind power is one of the most mature renewable energy technologies and it is possible to be utilized in large-scale. However, in the long run, the malicious competition will break the rule of the monopoly wind power mar...

This paper studies optimal investment and the dynamic cost of income uncertainty, applying a stochastic programming approach. The motivation is given by a case study in Finnish agriculture. Investment decision is modelled as a Markov decision process, extended to account for risk. A numerical framework for studying the dynamic uncertainty cost is presented, modifying the classical expected valu...

Farm households in developing countries are generally credit constrained. This forces them to simultaneously take production and consumption decisions. In this paper, a two-period lifecycle model of the farm household is constructed and the household’s investment response to changes in land and agricultural output prices are derived theoretically. It is shown that in the absence of credit marke...

In a chemical cluster, there are a large number of enterprises, which are adjacent, so that their risk not only depends on own risk management strategies, but also on those of all others. With this, how to prevent domino effect is becoming more and more essential. Consider external domino effects, while some enterprises take a certain level of security investment, there is a certain probability...

In Australia, farm injury is associated with many hazards in differing production systems; farm injury is a high risk for the population that lives and works in rural settings, settings that are often isolated—physically and socially. The prevention of farm injury requires a multifaceted collaboration on the part of a number of key stakeholder agencies and the employment of contemporary public ...

One of the great challenges in agricultural development and sustainable intensification is the assurance of social equity in food security oriented interventions. Development practitioners, researchers, and policy makers alike could benefit from prior insight into what interventions or environmental shocks might differentially affect farmers' food security status, in order to move towards more ...

This paper studies optimal pay-as-you-go social security with positive bequests and endogenous fertility. With an investment externality, a competitive solution without social security suffers from under-investment in capital and over-reproduction of population. We show that social security can improve welfare by reducing fertility and increasing capital intensity. We also illustrate numericall...

The economics of investment in cyber security is a widely researched field. This paper describes the use of a multi-player collaborative exercise implemented on computers to help companies better understand investment decisions in cyber security. The investment model driving the collaborative exercise is an expected-value decision analysis that compares the reduction of cyber risks with other i...

Today business environment is highly dependent on complex technologies, and information is considered an important asset. Organizations are therefore required to protect their information infrastructure and follow an inclusive risk management approach. One way to achieve this is by aligning the information security investment decisions with respect to organizational strategy. A large number of ...