Safeguarding the banking system in an environment of financial cycles: an overview

Banks and banking ; Risk ; Banking law ; Bank supervision

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS: NEW VALUE-ADDED LIVESTOCK AND POULTRY INITIATIVES

Livestock Production/Industries,

THE 3 Rs OF STRATEGIC ALLIANCE FORMATION: RESOURCES, RENTS, AND (PROPERTY) RIGHTS

This paper examines the formation and governance of strategic alliances. In particular, the problem is defined for the development of alliances in agriculture, where new organizational forms are arising rapidly for horizontal and vertical coordination of the production-marketing chain. As the title of this research conference implies, these organizational forms offer opportunities within the portfolio of strategies facing agricultural producers for reconfiguring their marketing and managing risks by joint/collective action. The basis for the paper is the resource-based theory (RBT) of firm strategy, which has developed over the past ten years as a way to build positive and normative models of strategic decisions. The RBT draws from industrial organization economics and organizational economics (often called neoinstitutional economics) as a way to model the sources and robustness of sustainable competitive advantage. This paper extends to RBT to the joint strategies of firms engaged in strategic alliances. Additionally, the analysis turns on the manner by which economic rents are earned in a strategic alliance and how they are shared by alliance partners. What rights do alliance partners have to jointly earned returns in the alliance, given its organizational form (statutory structure and governance structure), the sources of economic rents, risks associated with the rent streams, and the often intangible resources (assets) that drive the performance of the joint assets in the alliance? This discussion paper presents a brief review of the RBT model, followed by a discussion of the sources of, and durability of, economic rents that accrue to firm resources. These sections are essentially résumés of the current literature on RBT. The third section departs from the literature in explicitly considering a model of strategic alliance formation as the development of a portfolio of jointly held alliance resources that are linked to the resource portfolios of the individual alliance partners. The fourth section presents further extensions of RBT to examine the problems of ex ante and ex post division of alliance rents. One extension is the exploitation of the property rights theory of economic behavior (cf. Barzel, 1989) to explain how the economic rent streams from the resource portfolio should be shared among alliance partners, including participating financial institutions.Agribusiness,

Sustainability, Externalities and Economics: The Case of Temperate Perennial Grazing Systems in NSW

The replacement of perennial grass species by undesirable annual grass weeds not only results in lower productivity but is also contributes to a range of external costs. In particular, shallow rooted annuals result in greater deep drainage and therefore a greater potential for salinity, and greater volumes of runoff of poor quality water to streams. In this paper an economic framework for examining the sustainability issues of a perennial grazing system on the NSW Central Tablelands is presented. This involves a combination of simulation and dynamic programming models, with the state of the system represented by variables for the perennial grass composition and soil fertility. The paper examines a range of management strategies that increase the perennial grass composition in terms of net income from grazing, and the impact upon the externalities.perennial pasture, sustainability, externalities, bioeconomic modelling, dynamic programming, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, 160,

Aquaculture for African smallholders

Small scale aquaculture, Integrated farming, Aquaculture systems, Appropriate technology, Malawi, Agribusiness,

Linearized Gravity in Brane Backgrounds

A treatment of linearized gravity is given in the Randall-Sundrum background. The graviton propagator is found in terms of the scalar propagator, for which an explicit integral expression is provided. This reduces to the four-dimensional propagator at long distances along the brane, and provides estimates of subleading corrections. Asymptotics of the propagator off the brane yields exponential falloff of gravitational fields due to matter on the brane. This implies that black holes bound to the brane have a "pancake"-like shape in the extra dimension, and indicates validity of a perturbative treatment off the brane. Some connections with the AdS/CFT correspondence are described.Comment: 31 pages, harvmac. v2: minor typo and reference corrections. v3: minor corrections to eqs and discussio

Obstacles to Optimal Policy: The Interplay of Politics and Economics in Shaping Bank Supervision and Regulation Reforms

This paper provides a positive political economy analysis of the most important revision of the U.S. supervision and regulation system during the last two decades, the 1991 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA). We analyze the impact of private interest groups as well as political-institutional factors on the voting patterns on amendments related to FDICIA and its final passage to assess the empirical importance of different types of obstacles to welfare-enhancing reforms. Rivalry of interests within the industry (large versus small banks) and between industries (banks versus insurance) as well as measures of legislator ideology and partisanship play important roles and, hence, should be taken into account in order to implement successful change. A divide and conquer' strategy with respect to the private interests appears to be effective in bringing about legislative reform. The concluding section draws tentative lessons from the political economy approaches about how to increase the likelihood of welfare-enhancing regulatory change.

IMPACTS OF MAPLE SYRUP GRADING LAWS ON THE MAPLE PRODUCING REGIONS OF UNITED STATES AND CANADA

Agricultural and Food Policy,

How Does Household Income Affect Child Personality Traits and Behaviors?

Existing research has investigated the effect of early childhood educational interventions on the child's later-life outcomes. These studies have found limited impact of supplementary programs on children's cognitive skills, but sustained effects on personality traits. We examine how a positive change in unearned household income affects children's emotional and behavioral health and personality traits. Our results indicate that there are large beneficial effects of improved household financial wellbeing on children's emotional and behavioral health and positive personality trait development. Moreover, we find that these effects are most pronounced for children who are lagging behind their peers in these measures before the intervention. Increasing household incomes reduce differences across adolescents with different levels of initial emotional-behavioral symptoms and personality traits. We also examine potential channels through which the increased household income may contribute to these positive changes. Parenting and relationships within the family appear to be an important mechanism. We also find evidence that a sub-sample of the population moves to census tracts with better income levels and educational attainment

The release of a captive-raised female African Elephant <em>(Loxodonta africana</em>) in the Okavango Delta, Botswana

Wild female elephants live in close-knit matrilineal groups and housing captive elephants in artificial social groupings can cause significant welfare issues for individuals not accepted by other group members. We document the release of a captive-raised female elephant used in the safari industry because of welfare and management problems. She was fitted with a satellite collar, and spatial and behavioural data were collected over a 17-month period to quantify her interactions with the wild population. She was then monitored infrequently for a further five-and-a-half years. We observed few signs of aggression towards her from the wild elephants with which she socialized. She used an area of comparable size to wild female elephants, and this continued to increase as she explored new areas. Although she did not fully integrate into a wild herd, she had three calves of her own, and formed a social unit with another female and her calf that were later released from the same captive herd. We recommend that release to the wild be considered as a management option for other captive female elephants