Risk Assessment of Grape Berry Moth and Guidelines for Management of the Eastern Grape Leafhopper

Several factors have prompted the reevaluation of control recommendations for key pests of grapes in recent years. First, the costs of insecticides and their application have risen substantially. Growers who improve the efficiency of their use of pesticides can realize significant savings in production costs. Second, grape processors have responded to consumer desires to minimize pesticide residues in food by promoting judicious use of pesticides. Finally, increased governmental restrictions regarding what pesticides can be used in vineyards and how they may be used may increase the overall difficulty that growers encounter when using pesticides. The result of these factors is that while producers and processors continue to require control of economically-damaging pests, this now must be achieved with the least amount of pesticide possible. The Grape Berry Moth Risk Assessment Program was developed to address these concerns. In this publication we describe how Risk Assessment can be used to maintain acceptable control of grape berry moth and the Eastern grape leafhopper while minimizing use of insecticides

Finance, foreign (direct) investment, and the Dutch disease: the case of Colombia

In recent years Colombia has grown relatively rapidly, but it has been a biased growth. The energy sector (the locomotora minero-energetica, to use the rhetorical expression of President Juan Manuel Santos) grew much faster than the rest of the economy, while the manufacturing sector registered a negative rate of growth. These are classic symptoms of the well-known ‘Dutch disease’, but our purpose here is not to establish whether the Dutch disease exists or not, but rather to shed some light on the financial viability of several, simultaneous dynamics: (i) the existence of a traditional Dutch Disease being due to a large increase in mining exports and a significant exchange rate appreciation; (ii) a massive increase in foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly in the mining sector; (iii) a rather passive monetary policy, aimed at increasing purchasing power via exchange rate appreciation; (iv) more recently, a large distribution of dividends from Colombia to the rest of the world and the accumulation of mounting financial liabilities. The paper will show that these dynamics constitute a potential danger for the stability of the Colombian economy. Some policy recommendations are also discussed

Emirati women do not shy away from competition: evidence from a patriarchal society in transition

We explore gender attitudes towards competition in the United Arab Emirates—a traditionally patriarchal society which in recent times has adopted numerous policies to empower women and promote their role in the labor force. The experimental treatments vary whether individuals compete in single-sex or mixed-sex groups. In contrast to previous studies, women in our sample are not less willing to compete than men. In fact, once we control for individual performance, Emirati women are more likely to select into competition. Our analysis shows that neither women nor men shy away from competition, and both compete more than what would be optimal in monetary terms as the fraction of men in their group increases. We offer a detailed survey of the literature and discuss possible reasons for the lack of gender differences in our experiment

Can urban coffee consumption help predict US inflation?

Motivated by the importance of coffee to Americans and the significance of the coffee subsector to the US economy, we pursue three notable innovations. First, we augment the traditional Phillips curve model with the coffee price as a predictor, and show that the resulting model outperforms the traditional variant in both in-sample and out-of-sample predictability of US inflation. Second, we demonstrate the need to account for the inherent statistical features of predictors such as persistence, endogeneity, and conditional heteroskedasticity effects when dealing with US inflation. Consequently, we offer robust illustrations to show that the choice of estimator matters for improved US inflation forecasts. Third, the proposed augmented Phillips curve also outperforms time series models such as autoregressive integrated moving average and the fractionally integrated version for both in-sample and out-of-sample forecasts. Our results show that augmenting the traditional Phillips curve with the urban coffee price will produce better forecast results for US inflation only when the statistical effects are captured in the estimation process. Our results are robust to alternative measures of inflation, different data frequencies, higher order moments, multiple data samples and multiple forecast horizons

Pheromonal Control of the Grape Berry Moth: An Effective Alternative to Conventional Insecticides

Cornell University scientists have conducted research on pheromones of the grape berry moth for nearly 20 years. These efforts provided a foundation for the development of the Isomate- GBM?* pheromone product. This product received EPA and New York State registrations in 1990. The purpose of this bulletin is to describe the impressive results obtained with the Isomate-GBM? pheromone in large-scale field trials conducted throughout New York, and to provide instructions on how to use the pheromone product most effectively