Conservation Auctions and Compliance: Theory and Evidence from Laboratory Experiments

Poster prepared for presentation at the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association 2010 AAEA,CAES, & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, July 25-27, 2010.Auctions, Conservation contracting, Compliance, Environmental Economics and Policy, C91, D44, Q24,

Adopting a common currency basket arrangement into the 'ASEAN plus three'

East Asian countries, for example "ASEAN plus three countries" (China, Korea, and Japan), have been well cognizant of importance of the regional financial cooperation since the Asian currency crisis in 1997. They have established the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) to manage currency crises. However, the CMI is not designed for "crisis prevention" because it includes no more than soft surveillance process as well as a network of currency swap arrangements. The surveillance process should be conducted over intra-regional exchange rates and exchange rate policies of the regional countries in order to stabilize intra-regional exchange rates in a situation of a strong economic relationship among the regional countries. On one hand, the regional exchange rate stability is related with an optimum currency area. Based on a Generalized PPP model, which detects a cointegration relationship among real effective exchanges rates, we investigate whether the region composed of "ASEAN plus three countries" is an optimum currency area. In the investigation, our interest is focused on an issue whether the Japanese yen could be regarded as an "insider" currency as well as other East Asian currencies. Or, is the Japanese yen still an "outsider" which is used as a target currency of foreign exchange rate policy for other East Asian countries. We employ a Dynamic OLS to estimate the long-term relationship among the East Asian currencies in a currency basket. Our empirical results indicate that the Japanese yen works as an exogenous variable in the cointegration system during a pre-crisis period while it works as an endogenous one during a post-crisis period. It implies that the Japanese yen could be regarded as an insider currency as well as other East Asian currencies after the crisis although it is regarded as an outsider currency as well as the US dollar and the euro before the Asian crisis.

Auctioning Conservation Contracts and Evaluating the Risk Attitudes of Farmers: Economic Experiments in Japan

Agri-environmental programs in Japan have generally been promoted through the provision of fixed payments for certain environment-friendly farming and management practices. However, the auctioning of agrienvironmental contracts is a noteworthy alternative for the furtherance of such programs. Conservation auctions are used to enhance the cost-effectiveness of public expenses and have been employed in practice as well as tested in various pilot projects in some countries. This study uses an experimental economics method to factor the risk attitude of participants into a comparison of uniform price (UP) auctions and discriminatory price (DP) auctions. Although some studies have compared fixed payments, UP auctions, and DP auctions, the superiority or inferiority of these strategies depends on the settings of an experiment. Consequently, experiments reflecting the Japanese situation could provide further insight into the advantages of each of these methods, and be used to guide policy design. In addition, the study also examines the effects of participants’ risk attitudes on auction performance. Its principal conclusion is that DP auctions outperform UP auctions; this is in line with the findings of previous studies. This empirical research furthers our understanding of environmental auctions in a first step toward the design of such auctions, but field experiments using real farmers should be conducted in order to help corroborate research conclusions before these are applied to the real world.conservation auction, experimental economics, risk attitude, environment-friendly farming, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management,

Inhibitory effect of curcumin on mammalian phospholipase D activity

AbstractCurcumin, the major yellow pigment of turmeric (Curcuma longa), has strong anti-carcinogenic and anti-inflammatory activities. We examined the effects of curcumin on enzyme activities of the following phospholipases in a cell-free system: G protein-mediated phospholipase D (PLD), phosphatidylinositol-specific phospholipase C, and phospholipase A2 from mouse macrophage-like cell line J774.1 cells, sphingomyelinase from bovine brain, and phosphatidylcholine-phospholipase C from Bacillus cereus. Curcumin inhibited several types of phospholipases, most effectively PLD among those tested. It also inhibited 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate-induced PLD activation in intact J774.1 cells in a dose-dependent manner. These results suggest that the anti-inflammatory and anti-carcinogenic action of curcumin is partly due to the inhibition of PLD

Clustering of Primordial Black Holes from QCD Axion Bubbles

We study the clustering of primordial black holes (PBHs) and axion miniclusters produced in the model proposed to explain the LIGO/Virgo events or the seeds of the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in arXiv:2006.13137. It is found that this model predicts large isocurvature perturbations due to the clustering of PBHs and axion miniclusters, from which we obtain stringent constraints on the model parameters. Specifically, for the axion decay constant $f_a=10^{16}~\mathrm{GeV}$, which potentially accounts for the seeds of the SMBHs, the PBH fraction in dark matter should be $f_\mathrm{PBH}\lesssim7\times 10^{-10}$. Assuming that the mass of PBHs increases by more than a factor of $\mathcal{O}(10)$ due to accretion, this is consistent with the observed abundance of SMBHs. On the other hand, for $f_a=10^{17}~\mathrm{GeV}$ required to produce PBHs of masses detected in the LIGO/Virgo, the PBH fraction should be $f_\mathrm{PBH}\lesssim6\times 10^{-8}$, which may be too small to explain the LIGO/Virgo events, although there is a significant uncertainty in calculating the merger rate in the presence of clustering.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figure

２項モデルの予測による金融リスク最小化 ： 理論と応用

要旨あり金融リスクの統計解析原著論