11,927 research outputs found
Weather derivatives: Concept and application for their use in South Africa
Recent innovations in energy markets suggest the possibility of addressing agricultural risk factors by issuing derivatives on weather elements. Such instruments appear particularly attractive, as asymmetric information and loss adjustment issues do not affect them. This article first describes the concept, functioning and application of weather derivatives. It then examines the feasibility of rainfall derivatives to manage agricultural production risk in South Africa by evaluating the merits of rainfall options, and suggesting an option strategy, as a yield risk management tool. The use of rainfall derivatives in South Africa is likely to increase in future as capital markets, financial institutions, insurance companies, crop insurance companies and hedge funds collectively organize themselves to share and distribute weather risks.Risk and Uncertainty,
Cash flow risk ratio: An aid to marketing decisions
In the past, the fully regulated marketing environment allowed producers to neglect or ignore the marketing side of their business. Now, with an open marketing system and increased volatility in the commodity markets, producers will have the right and the responsibility to determine their own financial security. One of the most difficult questions for producers to answer, is how much of his/her crop must be pre-harvest marketed. Knowing his/her production costs (both variable and fixed) and range of acceptable production, price, and financial risks are the key to determining his/her price objective. Producers can determine their degree of marketing flexibility by using the cash flow risk ratio. This ratio predicts what percentage of the projected crop must be marketed at the expected season average price to meet cash obligations. In this uncertain and risky future, failing to plan may be the same as planning to fail.Agricultural Finance, Marketing,
Analysis of CO<sub>2</sub> leakage through "low-permeability" faults from natural reservoirs in the Colorado Plateau, southern Utah
The numerous CO2 reservoirs in the Colorado Plateau region of the United States are
natural analogues for potential geologic CO2 sequestration repositories. To better
understand the risk of leakage from reservoirs used for long-term underground CO2
storage, we examine evidence for CO2 migration along two normal faults from a
reservoir in east-central Utah. CO2 -charged springs, geysers, and a hydrocarbon seep
are localised along these faults. These include natural springs that have been active for
long periods of time, and springs that were induced by recent drilling. The CO2 -charged
spring waters have deposited travertine mounds and carbonate veins. The faults cut
siltstones, shales, and sandstones and the fault rocks are fine-grained, clay-rich gouge,
generally thought to be barriers to fluid flow. The geologic and geochemical data are
consistent with these faults being conduits for CO2 to the surface. Consequently, the
injection of CO2 into faulted geologic reservoirs, including faults with clay gouge, must
be carefully designed and monitored to avoid slow seepage or fast rupture to the
biosphere
THE IMPACT OF INFLATION ON STOCK PRICES IN TWO SADC COUNTRIES
Demand and Price Analysis,
EMMIXcskew: an R Package for the Fitting of a Mixture of Canonical Fundamental Skew t-Distributions
This paper presents an R package EMMIXcskew for the fitting of the canonical
fundamental skew t-distribution (CFUST) and finite mixtures of this
distribution (FM-CFUST) via maximum likelihood (ML). The CFUST distribution
provides a flexible family of models to handle non-normal data, with parameters
for capturing skewness and heavy-tails in the data. It formally encompasses the
normal, t, and skew-normal distributions as special and/or limiting cases. A
few other versions of the skew t-distributions are also nested within the CFUST
distribution. In this paper, an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is
described for computing the ML estimates of the parameters of the FM-CFUST
model, and different strategies for initializing the algorithm are discussed
and illustrated. The methodology is implemented in the EMMIXcskew package, and
examples are presented using two real datasets. The EMMIXcskew package contains
functions to fit the FM-CFUST model, including procedures for generating
different initial values. Additional features include random sample generation
and contour visualization in 2D and 3D
Recommended from our members
Nonparametric regression analysis
textNonparametric regression uses nonparametric and flexible methods in analyzing complex data with unknown regression relationships by imposing minimum assumptions on the regression function. The theory and applications of nonparametric regression methods with an emphasis on kernel regression, smoothing spines and Gaussian process regression are reviewed in this report. Two datasets are analyzed to demonstrate and compare the three nonparametric regression models in R.Statistic
- …