Crop insurance is undoubtedly an extremely valuable element in protecting agricultural businesses, but in many cases standard indemnity-based products have had very low uptake due to high transaction costs elevating premiums to unaffordable levels. Index insurance options in which coverage is written on a publicly observable "trigger" (involving much lower transaction costs) have begun to fill the void. In almost all of the previous economics literature on index insurance, the only variable that the insurance demander is permitted to choose is the payment to be received should the index trigger value be verified. However, it is clear that the trigger value itself is an integral element in the contract, and it is an element about which the insurance demander has clear preferences. In this article, we analyze the optimal demand for index insurance under the assumption that the demander can choose both the payment to be received if the index trigger is satisfied and the trigger value itself. We find that there is always an interior solution to this problem. We also consider the market equilibria that emerge under a variety of settings in regard to the position of the insurer. The article is cast within the scope of insurance for frost damage to a crop, but all of the results are directly applicable to any peril for which a publicly observable signal exists. The article shows that allowing the demander to choose both indemnity and trigger value should increase uptake of index insurance products.

This paper provides new evidence on the validity of using expert ratings of wine as a measure of wine quality for predicting the effects of climate change on the wine industry. We used Bob Campbell’s ratings of New Zealand wines to look for a relationship between the ratings and climatic variables that predicts a plausible optimal growing-season temperature for the main wine varieties and wine regions in New Zealand. Such a relationship can be used to forecast the effects of climate change on wine quality to better understand when wineries need to adapt to a warming climate. We used both individual wine ratings and overall vintage ratings, averaged by region and variety from the individual ratings, to compare in a controlled setting their success in predicting plausible optimal temperatures. We find that using the vintage ratings produces substantially more precise and plausible findings than using the individual ratings. We conclude that there is great potential in using vintage data constructed from expert ratings for individual wines for climate change research.

The aim of this paper is to present a conceptualization of entrepreneurial marketing approaches that wineries can adopt in internationalization. Bringing together literature on marketing, entrepreneurship, internationalization, networks and serendipity, we argue that adopting an entrepreneurial marketing orientation (EMO) is appropriate for the wine industry and offer a set of propositions based on networks and serendipity literature to support an EMO and internationalization framework. EMO allows the wine industry to navigate the competitive and turbulent nature of the industry and overcome the challenges during the early stage of the internationalization journey. The paper offers a foundation to better understand the internationalization process of the wine sector and the benefits of EMO to wineries entering international markets.

This study uses meta-analysis to study the effect of spillovers on exports. It collects 3291 estimated spillover effects from 99 studies. The estimated spillover effects in the literature span a large number of types and measures of both exports and spillovers. As a result, we transform estimates to partial correlation coefficients. We analyze these transformed effects using four different versions of Weighted Least Squares (WLS) estimators, incorporating both meta-analytic “Fixed Effects” and “Random Effects”. Our analysis produces three main findings. First, while we estimate an overall mean effect of spillovers on exports that is statistically significant, the size of the effect is economically negligible. Second, we find modest evidence for the existence of publication bias in the empirical literature. Publication bias can arise when researchers and journals have a preference to publish articles that find positive and significant results. While some of our tests indicate the presence of publication bias, in every case the size of the effect is small. Third, using both Bayesian Model Averaging and frequentist meta-regression analysis, we find that some data, estimation, and study characteristics are significant in some regressions. However, only a few of the characteristics are robust, and none are large in size.

This study replicates Ahn, Khandelwal, and Wei’s (2011) model of intermediary trade. The study produces two main results. First, the authors are able to reproduce empirical evidence for AKW’s three main predictions for Chinese exports. This is impressive because much of the data for their replication are independently sourced. However, when the authors subject their model to additional tests, they find that the evidence is not robust. Using more recently available data to test AKW′s first prediction, the authors estimate coefficients that are wrong-signed and significant. When they re-analyze the evidence supporting the second and third predictions, they find that the full sample results mask significant heterogeneity across Chinese regions. In many cases, key coefficients are insignificant. In a few cases, they are wrong-signed and significant. Finally, using multiple versions of a key variable measuring the number of required import documents by country, the authors discover that the results are not robust across versions.

We analyse discrepancy in the trade data between China and New Zealand, where what China reports as its exports to New Zealand and what New Zealand reports as its imports from China reached an alarming level of US$2.5 billion in 2014. We investigate the roles that export-tax and import-tariff avoidance play in explaining this discrepancy. We find strong evidence of export-tax avoidance for China’s exports to New Zealand that explains 11–27% of the missing exports, equivalent to 3.9–8.8% of true export value. We find only weak evidence of import-tariff avoidance in either direction.

China’s rapid rates of urbanization and income growth have led to a rapid escalation of domestic solid waste accumulated in landfills. Various policies have been adopted by the municipal governments to improve incentives for recycling in an attempt to reduce solid waste accumulation, but the effects of these efforts appear to have been mixed. The aim of this paper is to gain further understanding of the factors that influence households’ recycling behaviour. We administered a survey to residents of Harbin city in the north-eastern China to measure their recycling frequency as well as their understanding of and attitudes towards household solid waste management. We find that knowledge and attitude about household waste management explain recycling behaviour well but that attitudes about government involvement and feeling of peer pressure do not. We find strong evidence that higher education is linked to higher frequency of recycling, weak evidence that age has a positive but diminishing effect on recycling and that income has a negative effect on recycling, and no evidence that gender affects recycling.

China’s rapid rates of urbanization and income growth have led to skyrocketing of the accumulation of domestic solid waste in landfills. Various policies have been adopted by the municipal governments, including the city of Harbin, to improve incentives for recycling in an attempt to reduce solid waste accumulation, but the effects of these efforts appear to have been mixed. The aim of this paper is to gain further understanding of the factors that influence households’ recycling behavior. We administered a survey to residents of Harbin city to measure their recycling frequency as well as their understanding of and attitudes towards household solid waste management. We apply ordered logistic regression analysis to study the impact of the survey variables and socioeconomic factors on the frequency of recycling. We find that knowledge, attitudes about sorting and reuse, attitudes about government involvement in recycling programs, and understanding of the environmental effects of recycling have positive effects on recycling frequency. Education plays a significant positive role while gender, income and age play no significant role in recycling frequency.

The paper uses 2006 survey data to examine sex workers' safety in the post-decriminalised sex industry in New Zealand. We use probit analysis to examine institutional and individual factors that affect the likelihood of sex workers experiencing physical and sexual violence, theft and threats by clients. We find that alcohol and/or drug dependency more than doubles the risk of violence across the three sectors within the industry. After controlling for individual factors, including alcohol and drug use, we find no significant sectorial differences for the probability of violence, while the street sector has more theft and threats than the other sectors.

We analyze the success of filtering as a solution to the spam problem when used alone or concurrently with sender pricing, receiver pricing, or both. We find that filtering alone may exacerbate the spam problem in terms of both the total number of spam message sent and the expected number of spam messages received, because it may cause the spammer to send multiple variants of his message to each customer in an attempt to evade the filter. Sender and receiver prices work as expected. The effectiveness of each instrument improves as the levels of other instruments are increased.

The fixed-price-offer (FPO) mechanism in Trade Me auctions allows sellers to make a take-it-or-leave-it offer at the conclusion of an unsuccessful auction. Weinvestigate the effects of the FPO option on strategies and outcomes in independent-value auctions. The FPO option induces some bidders with a value above the seller's reserve to wait for an FPO instead of bidding. Overall, the FPO option increases the probability of sale but reduces expected seller revenue compared with a standard auction. The impact of the FPO option is reduced when the number of bidders increases.

This article is concerned with models in which an agent faces a lottery with j other agents for a prize, so that the probability of winning the prize is 1/(j + 1), and where j is stochastic. After describing four different situations where such a lottery is present, we construct the expected value of the probability of winning such a lottery and prove a theorem that presents the expected value in a simpler form. We then give an example of the theorem being applied to gain new insights into auction theory.

This study analyzes the impact on income inequality of government efforts to increase agricultural incomes in rural China. It collects and analyzes survey data from 473 households in Yunnan, China in 2004. In particular, it investigates the effects of government efforts to promote improved upland rice technologies. Our analysis shows that farmers who adopted these technologies had incomes approximately 15% higher than non-adopters. Despite this relatively large increase, we estimate that the impact on income inequality was relatively slight. This is primarily due to the fact that lower-income farmers adopted the improved rice technology at rates that were roughly equivalent to those of higher-income farmers. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

We examine a two-stage duopoly game in which firms advertise their existence to consumers in stage 1 and compete in prices in stage 2. Whenever the advertising technology generates positive overlap in customer bases, the equilibrium for the stage-1 game is asymmetric in that one firm chooses to remain small in comparison to its competitor. For a specific random advertising technology, we show that one firm will always be half as large as the other. No pure-strategy price equilibrium exists in the stage-2 game, and as long as there is some overlap in customer bases, the mixed-strategy price equilibrium does not converge to the Bertrand equilibrium.

Consider a model in which a consumer faces a lottery with j other people for a prize, so that the probability of winning the prize is 1/(j+1). Now let j be a random variable, determined by the binomial distribution. Specifically, let there be n potential competitors for the consumer in the lottery, each with an independent probability of π of being a competitor. In this note, we show how the resulting expression for the expected value of 1/(j+1) using binomial probabilities can be simplified by means of the binomial theorem.

We compare the magnitude of, and welfare generated by, uniform welfare-maximising, Ramsey and monopoly pricing in email networks. Messages are defined by the utility they give to their sender and receiver. Senders tend to pay more than receivers when the average sender utility is higher than the average receiver utility, and vice versa. When message preference distributions are symmetric receivers pay more than senders. Because prices cannot be (too) negative, the interior solutions for all price types hold only when the distributions for sender and receiver utility are similar. The comparative welfare analysis shows that in some situations the use of uniform, Ramsey and zero prices will not generate substantial welfare losses relative to feasible perfectly discriminatory prices. Monopoly prices are unlikely to be efficient.

This study analyzes the impact of government efforts to increase agricultural incomes on income inequality in rural China. It collects and analyzes survey data from 473 households in Yunnan, China in 2004. In particular, it investigates the effects of government efforts to promote improved upland rice technologies. Our analysis shows that farmers who adopted these technologies had incomes approximately 32 percent higher than non-adopters. While much of this came from increased incomes from the selling of upland rice, adopters also enjoyed higher incomes from other cash crops. We attribute this to technology spillovers. Despite substantial increases associated with the adoption of improved upland rice technologies, we estimate that the impact on income inequality was relatively slight. This is primarily due to the fact that low income farmers had relatively high rates of technology adoption.