ECONOMICS OF GASOHOL

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Forecasting the price of gold

This article seeks to evaluate the appropriateness of a variety of existing forecasting techniques (17 methods) at providing accurate and statistically significant forecasts for gold price. We report the results from the nine most competitive techniques. Special consideration is given to the ability of these techniques to provide forecasts which outperforms the random walk (RW) as we noticed that certain multivariate models (which included prices of silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium, besides gold) were also unable to outperform the RW in this case. Interestingly, the results show that none of the forecasting techniques are able to outperform the RW at horizons of 1 and 9 steps ahead, and on average, the exponential smoothing model is seen providing the best forecasts in terms of the lowest root mean squared error over the 24-month forecasting horizons. Moreover, we find that the univariate models used in this article are able to outperform the Bayesian autoregression and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, with exponential smoothing reporting statistically significant results in comparison with the former models, and classical autoregressive and the vector autoregressive models in most cases

Production and Use of Fuel Ethanol from Corn or Wheat

This archival publication may not reflect current scientific knowledge or recommendations. Current information available from the University of Minnesota Extension: https://www.extension.umn.edu

Treatment of rising damp in historical buildings: wall base ventilation

Intervention in older buildings increasingly requires extensive and objective knowledge of what one will be working with. The multifaceted aspect of work carried out on buildings tends to encompass a growing number of specialities, with marked emphasis on learning the causes of many of the problems that affect these buildings and the possible treatments that can solve them. Moisture transfer in walls of old buildings, which are in direct contact with the ground, leads to a migration of soluble salts responsible for many building pathologies.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V23-4H7T0H7-1/1/f5e8a4ec173c5dadf120770678facf4

Optimal dynamic portfolio selection with earnings-at-risk

In this paper we investigate a continuous-time portfolio selection problem. Instead of using the classical variance as usual, we use earnings-at-risk (EaR) of terminal wealth as a measure of risk. In the settings of Black-Scholes type financial markets and constantly-rebalanced portfolio (CRP) investment strategies, we obtain closed-form expressions for the best CRP investment strategy and the efficient frontier of the mean-EaR problem, and compare our mean-EaR analysis to the classical mean-variance analysis and to the mean-CaR (capital-at-risk) analysis. We also examine some economic implications arising from using the mean-EaR model. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.postprin