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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a continuous time version of the speculative storage model of Deaton and Laroque (1992) and to use for pricing derivatives, in particular insurances on agricultural prices.

The methodology of financial engineering is used in order to find the partial differential equations that the dynamics of derivative prices have to satisfy. Furthermore, by using the Monte-Carlo method (and Feynman-Kac theorem) the insurance prices is computed.

Results of this paper show that insurance prices (and derivative prices in general) are heavily influenced by market structure, in particular, the demand function specifications. Furthermore, through an empirical analysis, the performance of the continuous time speculative storage model is compared with the geometric Brownian motion model. It is shown that the speculative storage model outperforms the actual data.

Since the agricultural insurances in many countries are subsidised by government, the results of this paper can be used by policy makers to measure changes in agricultural insurance premiums in scenarios that market experiences changes in demand. In the same manner, insurance companies and investors can use the results of this paper to better price agricultural derivatives.

The issue of agricultural insurance pricing (in general derivative pricing) is of great concern to policy makers, investors and insurance companies. To the author’s knowledge, an approach which uses the methodology of financial engineering to compute the insurance prices (in general derivatives) is new within the literature.

This study aims to investigate the dynamics of legitimacy and accountability relationships in an Indonesian boarding school. It examines how the key actors improve and use accountability mechanisms in the school and how these practices contribute to the organisation’s legitimacy.

This paper uses a qualitative case study approach in an Indonesian boarding school and draws on Black’s (2008) notion of legitimacy and accountability relationships. The qualitative data were collected through face-to-face interviews, observations and documentary analysis.

Accountability mechanisms at Pondok Pesantren Wali Songo (an Islamic boarding school) were developed to alter the habit of conducting organisational affairs based merely on trust between the organisation members without any particular accountability mechanism, a common practice in Indonesian boarding schools. The mechanisms were believed to improve the public trust and bring convenience to the management of the school on the legitimacy (halal) of their doings, which in turn maintain their legitimacy as a provider of Islamic education services.

This study highlights the importance of accountability mechanisms in faith-based institutions context to maintain their legitimacy. It provides evidence of the mutual nature of accountability and legitimacy, which is often seen as contrasting concepts by previous studies, by drawing on Black’s (2008) legitimacy and accountability relationships.

Black (1976) model assumes a lognormal distribution for futures prices, and has been shown to misprice deep in-the-money and deep out-of-the-money futures options. in this paper, the jump-diffusion stochastic interest rates model developed by Doffou and Hilliard (1999a) is fitted to currency futures and futures options data to yield probabilistic information. The model implies non-normal skewness and kurtosis for the log of price relative, and prices currency futures options better than Bates' (1991) model and far better than Black's model.

Three years after the introduction of exchange‐traded options on the American scene, a call options market was made with ten popular common stocks in Singapore in early 1977. Only calls were traded and no puts were introduced. After six months of trading actively, volume dwindled, and the market was withdrawn in early 1980. Three currency options markets introduced in 1987 continues to thrive at the time of this study. The reason for the demise of the call options market is mainly the significant mispricing of the contracts as most contracts were systematically above the theoretical fair prices. Low volatility in the spot market after the calls were introduced, availability of alternative speculative instrument for traders, high transaction costs and the lack of knowledge about the complexity of options trades are suggested as reasons for the failure of the market. As a new options market has been introduced again in March, 1993, it is worthwhile to learn from the past.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategy that a turnaround in the USA will portend a turnaround in the UK's economy and property market. For this strategy to operate, it is assumed that the capital and property markets in and between the two nations are highly integrated with endogenous pricing functions.

Given the endogenous assumptions of the conjectured research statement, tests of integration (or segmentation) between two capital and property markets are conducted. Correlation, tracking error analysis, and a multiple systematic risk factor model are used to test the pricing relationships. The methodological form employs variant macroeconomic variable pricing models (MVM) of alternative combinations of systematic affects operating across and between the national markets.

Pricing integration is noted between the UK and US capital markets, while the property markets are economically and statistically segmented. Opportunities for arbitrage based on different prices/returns for equivalent risk exposures are statistically observed between the UK and USA. The effect is that systematic pricing between the two markets cannot be addressed solely by diversification options. This infers a potential for arbitrage (statistically, strategically or in practice) is possible, given that systematic risk exposures between the two markets are not equivalently priced across cyclical phases. In this context it is inferred that the probable measure of pricing differences across the two markets is more than a cyclical lag effect.

The paper delineates the degrees of integration/segmentation in the UK and US property and capital markets as a function of systematic risks in changing economic conditions. These differences support the existence of statistical arbitrage and the specification of investment behaviour as a function of differencing pricing expectations. These findings can assist in the formulation of investment and hedging strategies to assist in managing international portfolios subject to cyclical market exposures. This paper contributes to an understanding of and foundation for testing the nature and impact of cycles on property investment performance as a function of pricing changes.

The development of standardized measures of institution‐wide volatility exposures has so far lagged that for measures of asset price and interest‐rate exposure—largely because it is difficult to reconcile the various mathematical models used to value options. Recent mathematical results, however, can be used to construct standardized measures of volatility exposure. We consider here techniques for reconciling “vegas” for financial options valued using stochastic models that may be mathematically inconsistent with each other.

At the beginning of the production year producers face a complex risk management decision environment given by risks specific to their operation, multiple crop insurance contracts and hedging opportunities. The purpose of this paper is to provide a producer-level framework for risk management decision making, focusing on the interaction between crop insurance and hedging.

The authors develop a Monte Carlo simulation model that generates a producer’s net income (NI) distribution that incorporates historical producer risk, price-yield correlation via a copula, price risk, and production costs. The authors evaluate the NI distribution through a modified Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) decision framework. The authors use the modified MPT decision framework to explore tradeoffs between expected NI and farm ruin (defined as 1 or 5 percent expected shortfall) from different crop insurance contracts and pre-harvest hedging options.

Only revenue protection and the highest two levels of coverage level exist on the efficient frontier. The level of hedging on the efficient frontier ranges from 0 to 55 percent of Actual Production History. The authors find that increasing coverage level 5 percent (from 80 to 85 percent) negatively impacts the optimal hedging amount by 26 percentage points (from 35 to 9 percent).

The model provides the precise identification of financial benefits from different risk management strategies by incorporating producer-level historical yield data, using a copula to capture yield-price dependency structure and producer production cost in generating the NI distribution. This model can be applied to any producer’s characteristics and data.

Recent U.S. Treasury yields have been constrained to some extent by the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates. Therefore, we compare the performance of a standard affine Gaussian dynamic term structure model (DTSM), which ignores the ZLB, to a shadow-rate DTSM, which respects the ZLB. Near the ZLB, we find notable declines in the forecast accuracy of the standard model, while the shadow-rate model forecasts well. However, 10-year yield term premiums are broadly similar across the two models. Finally, in applying the shadow-rate model, we find no gain from estimating a slightly positive lower bound on U.S. yields.

Firms facing significant income volatility can often suffer from downside risk such that return on assets is insufficient to meet fixed financial obligations. The purpose of this paper is to provide a prescriptive credit solution for small businesses facing exogenous income risk.

Formulas for risk‐contingent operating and collateralized loans are developed and simulated in the context of a specific business sector.

The paper demonstrates that a structured credit product with an imbedded option can reduce or eliminate financial risks by providing payouts that decrease the amount of principal and/or interest that firms must repay under low income states.

The overall objective of this paper is to provide a means to mitigate exogenous income risk faced by firms through the design and application of a risk‐contingent credit product that is tied to primary markets and simple to implement. In this context, risk contingency credit refers to a suite of financial products with payoff schedules (loan principal) that are linked to specific commodities or indices. The authors are in fact unaware of any commercial financial products of the type considered in this paper and thus their approach is a prescriptive solution to the identified problem.

While asset/liability management (A/L M) has been applied widely by insurers for 15 years, it has had mixed results. This article describes how initial efforts were unsuccessful, due to the focus on accounting values rather than economic values. The author asserts that insurers must rectify this misstep before A/L M can become a useful tool for them. Several forces are combining to ensure that this takes place in the near future.