As the title suggests, this paper compares two “formula” or mechanical investment techniques, dollar cost averaging and a relatively new proposal, value averaging, to a form of random investing to determine if any technique yields superior investment performance. Results indicate that value averaging does provide superior expected investment returns when investment prices are quite volatile and...

The mobile online medium (i.e. mobile data communication) allows the creation of context-sensitive profiles for mobile consumers by using identityand context information and thereby enabling the efficient targeting of current consumers' needs. However, current implementations of Mobile Marketing activities do not make use of these beneficial unique features and apply, for instance, content-base...

We separate the “rentier” portion of the budget constraint of the representative agent from the “income-plus-distributed profits” segment. The former’s wealth consists exclusively of returns on government bonds, the latter’s wealth is wage income from working for firms plus the distributed profits of the latter. The non-neoclassical element is the non-imposition of the market-clearing assumptio...

introduction agriculture relies on nature and farmers face environmental, social, financial and legal issues that makes farming to be consistently and strongly associated with risk. agriculture can be considered to be the most risky economic venture. ahmadi (1) listed several main sources of risk that farmers face. economic risk includes price fluctuations for raw materials such as seed and fer...

The use of cointegration techniques to measure market integration and Granger Causality to establish the direction and strength by which markets influence each other is taken a stage further. The importance of first testing whether trends and cycles in the price series are deterministic or stochastic processes is pointed out. This in turn establishes the appropriate form of equations to be used...

We have been asked to write a commentary on the articles on market reform appearing in this volume. Since we are economists, we concentrate on the articles by Evans and Rice, which directly address the application of economics to health policy. The Evans article attacks marketoriented reforms of health care systems. There are four elements to his argument: (1) A redistributive “rent-seeking” ag...

China is one of the most heavily polluted nations and is also the largest agricultural producer. There are relatively few studies measuring the effects of pollution on crop yields in China, and most are based on experiments or simulation methods. We use observational data to study the impact of increased air pollution (surface ozone) on rice yields in Southeast China. We examine nonlinearities ...

Apparent amylose content (AAC), the key determinant of rice end-use quality attributes, is primarily controlled by the Waxy gene which codes for granule bound starch synthase (GBSS). We examined the combination of sequence variation in the Waxy gene and environmental effects, and their associations with AAC using 171 rice accessions originating from 43 countries. The combination of two single-n...

Genetically engineered (GE) or transgenic biofortified crops with an increased vitamin and/ or mineral content have large potential to improve public health, but their availability for consumers is still hampered. Over the last years, various GM crops with health benefits have been developed in which genes, mostly originating from other organisms, have been added. Notable examples include rice ...

We examine the pricing of aggregate volatility risk in the cross-section of stock returns. Consistent with theory, we find that stocks with high sensitivities to innovations in aggregate volatility have low average returns. Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility relative to the Fama and French (1993, Journal of Financial Economics 25, 2349) model have abysmally low average returns. This phen...