Financial Characteristics of North Dakota Farms 2001-2010

The performance of over 500 North Dakota farms, 2001-2010, is summarized using 16 financial measures. Farms are categorized by geographic region, farm type, farm size, gross cash sales, farm tenure, net farm income, debt-to-asset, and age of farmer to analyze relationships between financial performance and farm characteristics. Five-year averages, 2005-2009, are also presented. In 2010, median and average acreage per farm was 2,010 and 2,579, respectively. Median and average cash farm revenue was $469,023 and$631,920, respectively. Over 70% of farms were crop farms and 47 percent of farms had gross sales exceeding $500,000. Median age of farm operators was 47. Median net farm income in 2010 was$174,010, up sharply from $47,547 in 2009. Financial measures for 2010, 2008 and 2007 were much superior to those in other years for the 2001-2010 period. The Red River Valley and crop farms typically had stronger profitability, solvency, and repayment capacity from 2001 to 2010 than other regions and farm types, respectively. Exceptions were 2007 and 2009 when the north central region had the best regional performance and 2005 when the south central region and livestock farms had better performance. The 2010 median net farm income was$239,426 for crop farms and $48,775 for livestock farms. Farms with sales less than$500,000 were over twice as likely to have debt-to-asset higher than 70 percent as farms with sales greater than $500,000. Farms that own some crop land, but less than 40 percent were more likely to be crop farms, farm more acreage, have larger sales, and be more profitable. As expected, solvency and percent of crop land owned increased with farmer age. Median net farm income as a percent of gross revenue was the highest of the decade in 2010, 33.1 percent, and the lowest in 2009, 13.4 percent. It was 24 percent in 2008 and 30.6 percent in 2007 after ranging from 22.4 to 14 percent between 2001 and 2006Farm financial management, farm management, farm income, liquidity, solvency, profitability, repayment capacity, financial efficiency, financial benchmarks, tenure, North Dakota., Agricultural Finance, Farm Management, Financial Economics,

A Coordinated Market Economy to Benefit the Poor

This article aims to investigate the possible role of agriculture with regard to poverty alleviation and development. It focuses more specifically on the problem of numerous smallholder farming families, who currently fail to get access to well and fair functioning market services and as a result get caught in the poverty trap and even face starvation. With reference to the framework of Transaction Costs Economy (TCE), it will be argued that market- and state failure are among the causes of this problem and that it is not likely to be solved through further liberalisation and more competition in global agricultural markets. A possible solution lies in state and other actors’ support for the development of markets and institutions that effectively support agriculture growth and strengthen the farmers’ bargaining power. The first sections will briefly describe rural poverty and the bottlenecks to agricultural development. Next is an elaboration on the concept “globalisation” and the differing economic views on globalisation and rural development. Finally, recommendations are made for policy changes.

Earnings Management in Belgium. a Review of the Empirical Evidence

Earnings are an extensively used summary statistic of a firm’s financial performance. Various corporate reporting scandals (such as Enron and Lernout & Hauspie) have raised concerns regarding the credibility of this performance measure. This paper first discusses the empirical evidence on earnings management practices by Belgian companies. This review indicates that Belgian companies manage earnings to avoid declines in earnings or losses, to influence relations with external financiers and to reduce taxes. Belgian companies quoted on the Brussels Stock Exchange also report significantly less income-decreasing earnings management than their non-quoted counterparts, presumably to meet or beat market expectations. Belgian earnings management studies further report that larger boards and Big6 auditors may constrain the extent of incomedecreasing earnings management.

Globalisation, Agricultural Development and Rural Welfare in Transition

This paper analyzes the impact of globalisation on agriculture, development and rural welfare in transition countries. First, we present an overview of insights on how globalisation has affected agriculture and rural households’ welfare in transition countries based on existing studies. Secondly, the paper presents new empirical evidence on how specific aspects of ‘globalisation’, in particular the inflow of foreign investment and the integration in international commodity markets, have affected Polish agriculture, and more specifically small-scale dairy farms. Given the characteristics of this sector (many poor small farmers, low quality output, direct need for investment and restructuring, ...) this study yields useful insights which have wider implications.

Attacking Poverty: Is It Globalisation?… Or Is It the Institutions?

We empirically analyze the relationship between globalisation and poverty. Deviating from the mainstream literature, we use ‘synthetic’ globalisation and poverty indicators, which combine multiple single indicators into single-valued statistics. Further, we study a sample that includes OECD countries as well as non-OECD countries, which allows us to examine the effect of structural differences between countries (summarized in a OECD dummy). Our results reveal no significant effect of globalisation on poverty when correcting for the OECD effect. We argue that this suggests institutional quality as a more fundamental determinant of a country’s poverty performance than the degree of integration with the global economy. On the methodological level, our use of synthetic indicators entails a parsimonious specification of the globalisation-poverty relationship, which increases its transparency.

The Rise or Fall of World Inequality Big Issue or Apparent Controversy?

In the age of globalization, the question whether inequality in the world rose or fell down, is a hot topic. Leading scholars in the field of economic inequality measurement developed methods to estimate empirically the distribution of welfare (income) amongst world citizens. Despite their similar methodologies, they do not seem to agree about the conclusion. In the present paper we pinpoint down what drives the two extreme positions apart. Sala-i-Martin (2002a,b), who claims that there can be no doubt that world inequality went down between the late seventies and the late nineties, has in fact calculated population weighted inequality between countries. Milanovic (2002a,b,c) does not deny this, but illustrates the empirical importance of divergent tendencies at the sub-national level (especially urban versus rural regions) for assessing true world inequality and comes to the reverse conclusion. Nevertheless, there seems to be unanimity, especially amongst the contributions quoted here, about the inequality measure(s) to be used for assessing world income distributions. We show that at least for international inequality, there is empirical evidence for rank reversals among the class of generalized entropy measures and expect the same to be true of world inequality. However, the normative debate about which inequality measure to use for assessing true world inequality has not yet begun.

Performance of Major Flare Watches from the Max Millennium Program (2001-2010)

The physical processes that trigger solar flares are not well understood and significant debate remains around processes governing particle acceleration, energy partition, and particle and energy transport. Observations at high resolution in energy, time, and space are required in multiple energy ranges over the whole course of many flares in order to build an understanding of these processes. Obtaining high-quality, co-temporal data from ground- and space- based instruments is crucial to achieving this goal and was the primary motivation for starting the Max Millennium program and Major Flare Watch (MFW) alerts, aimed at coordinating observations of all flares >X1 GOES X-ray classification (including those partially occulted by the limb). We present a review of the performance of MFWs from 1 February 2001 to 31 May 2010, inclusive, that finds: (1) 220 MFWs were issued in 3,407 days considered (6.5% duty cycle), with these occurring in 32 uninterrupted periods that typically last 2-8 days; (2) 56% of flares >X1 were caught, occurring in 19% of MFW days; (3) MFW periods ended at suitable times, but substantial gain could have been achieved in percentage of flares caught if periods had started 24 h earlier; (4) MFWs successfully forecast X-class flares with a true skill statistic (TSS) verification metric score of 0.500, that is comparable to a categorical flare/no-flare interpretation of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Centre probabilistic forecasts (TSS = 0.488).Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Solar Physic

Are European Convertibles More Debt-Like than the US Issues? An Empirical Analysis

The popular financial press often suggests that convertible debt issued by European firms is more debt-like in nature than convertible debt issued by US firms. This paper is the first to formally test the validity of this common perception. Our evidence indicates that European convertibles are effectively structured to be more debt-like than US convertibles. We also show that European convertible debt announcements induce less negative stockholder reactions than US announcements, which is consistent with the larger debt component of the former securities. Lastly, we explore some potential explanations for the relatively more debt-like design of European convertibles. Our results indicate that this finding may be attributable to both issuer-related and institutional differences across European and US convertible debt markets.

Indirect Inference for Stochastic Volatility Models via the Log-Squared Observations

An indirect estimator of the stochastic volatility (SV) model with AR(1) logvolatility is proposed. The estimator is derived as an application of the method of indirect inference (Gouriéroux, Monfort and Renault (1993)), using an auxiliary SV model that mimics the SV model of interest (which has latent volatility) but is constructed so as to make volatility observable. The resulting estimator works by fitting an AR(1) to the log-squared observations and then applying a simple transformation to the parameter estimates. A closed-form expression for the asymptotic covariance matrix of the estimator is also derived. The estimator is applied to the Brussels All Shares Price Index from January 1, 1980, to January 16, 2003.