Trading Carbon into Agriculture: making it happen

With agriculture occupying approximately sixty per cent of Australia’s land surface, policy makers, scientists and land managers are becoming increasingly interested in opportunities to sequester greenhouse emissions through land use change. The announcement of the Labor Government’s Carbon Farming Initiative brings Australian agriculture a step closer to participating in recognised domestic and international climate change mitigation action. In this paper, the costs and opportunities for carbon sequestration options under the Carbon Farming Initiative are assessed. The following section discusses the substantial hidden costs that may be associated with an offset trading scheme and potential for these costs to substantially shrink the size of the market. The paper concludes by presenting some potential solutions to the challenges raised and identifies some critical questions for policy makers.carbon trading, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Mixed contracts for the newsvendor problem with real options

In this paper we consider the newsvendor model with real options. We consider a mixed contract where the retailer can order a combination of q units subject to the conditions in a classical newsvendor contract and Q real options on the same items. We provide a closed form solution to this mixed contract when the demand is discrete and study some of its properties. We also offer an explicit solution for the continuous case. In particular we demonstrate that a mixed contract may be superior to a real option contract when a manufacturer has a bound on how much variance she is willing to accept.Newsvendor model; real options; discrete demand; mixed contract

Historical forest biomass dynamics modelled with Landsat spectral trajectories

Acknowledgements National Forest Inventory data are available online, provided by Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente (España). Landsat images are available online, provided by the USGS.Peer reviewedPostprin

People in the E-Business: New Challenges, New Solutions

[Excerpt] Human Resource Planning Society’s (HRPS) annual State of the Art/Practice (SOTA/P) study has become an integral contributor to HRPS’s mission of providing leading edge thinking to its members. Past efforts conducted in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999 have focused on identifying the issues on the horizon that will have a significant impact on the field of Human Resources (HR). This year, in a divergence from past practice, the SOTA/P effort aimed at developing a deeper understanding of one critical issue having a profound impact on organizations and HR, the rise of e-business. The rise of e-business has been both rapid and dramatic. One estimate puts the rate of adoption of the internet at 4,000 new users each hour (eMarketer, 1999) resulting in the expectation of 250 million people on line by the end of 2000, and 350 million by 2005 (Nua, 1999). E-commerce is expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2003, and of that, 87 percent will go to the business to business (B2B) and 13 percent to the business to consumer (B2C) segments, respectively (Plumely, 2000)

Mathematics in the Supply Chain

[no abstract available

Price Formation and Liquidity Provision in Short-Term Fixed Income Markets

Differences in market structures may affect the manner in which fundamental information is incorporated into prices. High levels of quote and trade transparency plus substantial quoting obligations in European government securities markets ensure that prices are informationally efficient. The relationship between price changes, order flow, relative depth and spreads across European and Canadian short-term government bond markets is examined via a reduced-form vector autoregression model. In European markets, dealers are able to quickly absorb private information elsewhere in the market. Consequently, spreads and the relative depth on the bid and offer sides of the market are found to be only slightly informative. Similarly, order flow, which reflects inventory management practices in addition to private information, explains a smaller proportion of the variation in asset returns in European markets than in Canadian interdealer brokered markets where no quoting obligations exist.Market structure and pricing; Financial markets; Interest rates