Master of Arts / Department of Economics / William F. Blankenau / This paper examines several different issues which could make the various Social Security programs insolvent. I evaluate each cause and how it is related to the problems experienced by each program to determine potential policy changes. I draw the majority of my data and information from peer-reviewed scholarly articles, as well as government agencies such as the Social Security Administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Congressional Research Service. Section 1 of the paper explains the history of the Social Security program and the circumstances creating it. Section 2 goes into greater detail explaining different issues which could make the system insolvent. These areas are: earnings inequality, changes in healthcare, increased life expectancy, changes in the dependency ratio, general trust fund issues, disability trust fund issues, political climate, and recessions/reduced earnings. In Section 3, I evaluate two different proposed plans to fix Social Security. The first plan is an academic plan, the Diamond-Orszag Plan; the second is a plan created by a think-tank, The Heritage Plan. Section 4 gives a conclusion of the implications of the paper and explains the benefits and drawbacks of the two evaluated plans. After evaluating all the problems with Social Security and the two proposed plans, I come to the conclusion that neither plan would be ideal by itself. The Diamond-Orszag Plan is the most politically feasible plan, as it doesn’t change the framework of the current program. A combination of the two plans would be most beneficial, as The Heritage Plan has policy specifically targeting the problems with the Medicare system, where the Diamond-Orszag Plan does not. The three different plans for changing the disability system I evaluate in Section 2.5 are specific, targeted plans and could be a nice addition to a plan such as the Diamond-Orszag Plan. In any case, the sooner politicians finally start taking Social Security’s instability seriously, the better. The longer we wait, the more complex and difficult the problem will become.

Master of Science / Department of Agricultural Economics / Glynn Tonsor / This decade has seen movements in commodity futures markets never seen before. There are many factors that have intensified price movements and volatility behavior. Those factors likely altering supply and demand include governmental policy within and outside of the U.S, weather shocks, geopolitical conflicts, food safety concerns etc. Whatever the reasons are for price movements it is clear that the volatility behavior in commodity markets constantly change, and risk managers need to use current and efficient tools to mitigate price risk. This study identified market structural breaks of realized volatility in corn, wheat, soybeans, live cattle, feeder cattle and lean hogs futures markets. Furthermore, this study analyzes the forecasting performance of implied volatility, historical volatility, a composite approach and a naïve approach as forecasters of realized volatility. The forecasting performance of these methods was analyzed in the full period of time of our weekly data from January 1995 to April 2014 and in each identified market regime for each commodity. Previous research has analyzed forecasting performance of implied volatility, a time series alternative and a composite method. However, to the best of my knowledge, they have not worried about market structural breaks in the data that might influence the performance of the mentioned forecasting methods in different periods of time. Overall, results indicate that indeed there are multiple market structural breaks present in the volatility datasets across all six commodities. We found differences in the forecasting performance of the analyzed methods when individual market regimes were analyzed. There seems to be evidence that corroborates the idea in the literature about the superiority of implied volatility over a historical volatility, a composite approach and a naïve approach. Additionally, implied volatility encompassed all the information contained in the historical volatility and the naïve measure across each identified market regime in all six commodities. Our results show that when both implied volatility and historical volatility are available, the benefit of combining those measures into a composite forecasting approach is very limited. Our results hold true for a short term 1 week ahead realized volatility forecast. It would be of interest to see how results vary for longer forecasting time horizons.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / David Barton / The main objective of this thesis is to aid Ag Valley Cooperative’s board of directors in the construction of a superior income distribution and equity redemption strategy. The key information provided is a detailed financial analysis and pro forma financial projections. Ultimately, this study focuses on increasing patron value by returning retained patronage refunds in an equitable and timely manner. This paper examines the benefits of eliminating Ag Valley Cooperative’s current equity redemption program, age of patron, and replacing it with a revolving fund. Chapter 1 introduces Ag Valley Cooperative and gives a brief description of the cooperative’s business model. The chapter concludes with the study’s methodology. Chapter 2 briefly examines cooperatives and people who use them. This chapter introduces Cooperative Performance Profile, the financial analysis used in the study. The chapter concludes with a look at cooperative finance theory and equity management. Chapter 3 describes key points of the Cooperative Performance Profile and separates it into five groupings: profitability, liquidity, solvency, efficiency, and size. Analyses are conducted in each category on Ag Valley Cooperative’s historic trends and comparisons to other Nebraska cooperatives. In Chapter 4 Ag Valley Cooperative’s current equity redemption strategy is defined along with four pro forma analyses. The first strategy, S0, assumes the cooperative continues business as normal with estate and age of patron redemption methods. Strategies S1 and S2 interject balance sheet management constraints and revolving fund redemption into the projection. In S1, revolving fund equity redemption is added to distribute any excess equity redemption budget, in S2 the revolving fund method is phased in. Strategy S3 builds upon S2 with a look at the effects and tax consequences of distributing non-qualified equity or retained patronage refunds instead of qualified retained patronage refunds.

Master of Science / Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Chih-Hang Wu / The recent economic crisis has been partially blamed on the decline in the housing market. This decline in the housing market resulted in an estimated 87% decline in value of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) between 2007 and 2008. This drastic decline in home values was sudden and unanticipated, thus it was incomprehensible for many investors how this would affect CDOs. This shows that while analytical techniques can be used to price CDOs, these techniques cannot be used to demonstrate the behavior of CDOs under radically different economic circumstances. To better understand the behavior of CDOs under different economic circumstances, numerical techniques such as Monte Carlo simulation can be used instead of analytical techniques to price CDOs. Andersen et al (2005) proposed a method for calculating the probability of defaults that could then be used in the Monte Carlo simulation to price the collateralized debt obligation. The research proposed by Andersen et al (2005) demonstrates the process of calculating correlated probability of defaults for a group of obligors. This calculation is based on the correlations between the obligors using copulas. Using this probability of default, the price of a collateralized debt obligation can be evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation. Monte Carlo simulation provides a more simple yet effective approach compared to analytical pricing techniques. Simulation also allows investors to have a better understanding of the behaviors of CDOs compared to analytical pricing techniques. By analyzing the various behaviors under uncertainty, it can be observed how a downturn in the economy could affect CDOs. This thesis extends on the use of copulas to simulate the correlation between obligors. Copulas allow for the creation of one joint distribution using a set of independent distributions thus allowing for an efficient way of modeling the correlation between obligors. The research contained within this thesis demonstrates how Monte Carlo simulation can be used to effectively price collateralized debt obligations. It also shows how the use of copulas can be used to accurately characterize the correlation between obligor defaults for pricing collateralized debt obligations. Numerical examples for both the obligor defaults and the price of collateralized debt obligations are presented to demonstrate the results using Monte Carlo simulation.

Master of Arts / Department of Economics / Lance J. Bachmeier / This thesis uses a structural VAR approach with a recursiveness assumption to examine the effects of an expansionary monetary policy shock on financial variables. We build this on the established research of the effects of monetary shocks on macro variables by measuring the expansionary shock as an increase in the money supply. We also investigate interest rate policy and test whether financial market variables matter for the determination of interest rate. We analyze four different cases in this paper using the innovations in the money supply, non-borrowed reserves, the interest rate and bond yield (including bonds with remaining maturity period close to 30- years) as a measurement for the expansionary monetary policy shock.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Brian Briggeman / “Skyscrapers of the plains” is a term which refers to the country elevators spread throughout Kansas and the Midwest, along with the elevators are farmer cooperatives. Farmer cooperatives have been around for more than a century to serve the area farmers as a place to store and market their grain and to purchase their farm inputs. The objective of this research is to identify key profitability drivers of farmer cooperatives of different sizes throughout time. This will be done by using a unique data set gathered from the CoBank’s RiskAnalysis database and examining it with the DuPont model. The project breaks down the data by size, large vs. small, and location. If a cooperative has done more than 100 million dollars in sales in 2010, it was classified as large for the entire time period, all other cooperatives were small. Location was either Kansas or Midwest. In this model, operating profit margin or earns, asset turnover ratio or turns, debt-to-equity ratio or leverage, and spread are examined. Also examined are Return on Assets, the operating performance, and Return on Equity, the financial performance, of the cooperative. Board of Directors and cooperative managers will be able to take this information and hopefully make decisions which make their respective cooperatives more profitable. With the information provided, cooperative managers and Board of Directors will be able to financially compare themselves versus other cooperatives of similar size whether they are in Kansas or in other Midwestern states.

Doctor of Philosophy / Agricultural Economics / Allen M. Featherstone / Christine Wilson / Farmland values have reached all-time highs and have significantly risen over the last few years. This has caused much debate about whether farmland prices are currently on a bubble and ready to burst, much like the earlier 1980s. Much research has been done on farmland values; however, work done outside of agricultural economics, looking at general asset values, can be incorporated into models of farmland value. Information cascades, or herding, are phenomenon where information in the market is sent between investors and this information is bid into the asset price, thus resulting in boom and bust periods. By using a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model, farmland price dynamics are modeled and analyzed for spatial dependencies from one region to the next. VAR allows for no a priori specification of network typology. This allows for the examination of the existence of information cascades and what form the network takes among spatially located farmland markets. This method is then compared to two other spatial estimation techniques. The first is a Spatial Autoregressive (SAR) model where network typology is imposed prior to estimation. The second is a VAR model where no network is modeled, and only the region’s own asset prices can influence future periods. It is found that information cascades exist and network typology is somewhat random. These results caution the current direction of the literature of imposing network or spatial structure. However, due to data requirements, SAR models are easier to estimate since they require less data and if network structure, which the SAR model inherently imposes by the weight matrix, could be determined by an autoregressive process instead of an adjacency rule it could prove to be the most accurate forecasting method.

Master of Science / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Farrell J. Webb / Farrell J. Webb / The purpose of this thesis was to examine how financial stressors influence family well-being. The specific thrust of this thesis was to examine if and how family well-being is influenced by financial stressors caused by the current economic crisis through an adaptation of Hills ABC-X Mosel (1949) known as the ABCE-WB Model. The ABC-X Model was adapted first by White (2007) who substituted the X—crisis element with the WB- well-being item. I added a new element to this model known as E—family expenditures. The data used in this thesis were gleaned from research conducted by Knowledge Networks on behalf of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research. The study was titled: Familial Responses to Financial Instability, How the Family Responds to Economic Pressure: A Comparative Study, 2009. In consisted of nationally representative a (multivariate) address the central hypotheses of this weighted a sample of 1,169 respondents. Analyses included simple correlations (bivariate) and hierarchical analyses investigation that explored what was the relation shop between the resources, perceptions, and expenditures a family had available to them in the current economic crisis and their well-being. The results indicate that approximately 22.4% of the variance in well-being could be explained by the elements in the ABCE-WB Model. In addition, there were several important relationships that were revealed between the predictors and the outcome measures individually. Overall, the efficacy and utility of the ABCE-WB Model was upheld by the results. Based on these findings future use of the ABCE-WB Model holds promise.

This work covers a substantial mosaic of related concepts in utility theory as applied to financial decision-making. It reviews some of the classical notions of Benthamite utility and the normative utility paradigm offered by the von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory; exploring its major pitfalls before moving into what is postulated as an entropic notion of utility. Extrinsic utility is proposed as a cardinally measurable quantity; measurable in terms of the expected information content of a set of alternative choices. The entropic notion of utility is subsequently used to model the financial behavior of individual investors based on their governing risk-return preferences involving financial structured products manufactured out of complex, multi-asset options. Evolutionary superiority of the Black-Scholes function in dynamic hedging scenarios is computationally demonstrated using a haploid genetic algorithm model programmed in Borland C. The work explores, both theoretically and computationally, the psycho-cognitive factors governing the financial behavior of individual investors both in the presence as well as absence of downside risk and postulates the concepts of resolvable and irresolvable risk. A formal theorem of consistent preference is proposed and proved. The work also analyzes the utility of an endogenous capital guarantee built within a financial structured product. The aspect of investor empowerment is discussed in terms of how financial behavior of an investor may be transformed if he or she is allowed a choice of one or more assets that may gain entry into the financial structured product. Finally there is a concluding section wherein the different facets are placed in their proper perspective and a number of interesting future research directions are also proposed.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Economics / Lloyd B. Thomas Jr / Dennis L. Weisman / This dissertation has focused primarily on the relationship between aggregate private output and a measure of the public fixed capital stock for the U.S. economy using two different approaches for the years 1947-2005. The study starts with a brief survey of the existing literature on the relationship between private output and public capital and continues with an analysis of data on some macroeconomic variables related to private output and public capital. It employs a production function approach to provide empirical estimates and analyze its econometric problems, and continues with a vector autoregression (VAR) model. It uses two criteria, the Akaike Information Criterion and the Schwartz Bayesian Criterion, to compare the performance of the two models tested. There are several differences between this study and the existing literature. The most important difference is that each of the other studies uses only a single approach to analyze the relationship between the public capital stock and private economic growth while this study uses two different methodologies to analyze the same relationship and tests the two models using the same aggregate macroeconomic annual data on the U.S. economy from 1947 to 2005. This study represents the first attempt to provide estimates of the elasticities of private output with respect to the private capital stock, private labor stock, public nonmilitary capital stock, and public core infrastructure capital stock by employing two different approaches so that the comparison of the elasticities resulting from the two different approaches can be most meaningful. Moreover, this study also represents the first attempt to provide estimates of the marginal products of the above four inputs. Second, the studies that employ a production function approach are ad hoc and so is the production function approach of this study, but the production function approach section of this study is the only one having an explicit capital evolution equation for both the private and the public capital stock. All of the other studies using annual data use aggregate macroeconomic data on related variables for less than thirty years while this study employs aggregate data from 1947 to 2005 (fifty nine years). Lastly, the other production function studies are incomplete in the sense that they either do not attempt to deal with some major econometric problems such as a common trend (resulting in a spurious correlation) and the direction of the causation or when they do acknowledge major econometric problems, they do not do anything to correct them. This study, on the other hand, will try to detect major econometric problems. Once the problem is detected, the study will employ measures to deal with the problem. Major findings of this study are as follows. First, the causation runs from the public fixed capital stock to private output rather than in the other direction. Second, most of the studies in the existing literature report a positive impact of the private fixed capital stock on private output that is too small to be credible, whereas they report a positive impact of the public fixed capital stock on private output that is too large to be credible. However, the estimates of this study suggest not only a positive impact of the public capital stock on private output that seems credible but also a positive and very large impact of the private capital stock on private output. Third, the results of several joint hypothesis tests conducted show that there is enough sample evidence to claim that not only that the private sector operates under constant returns to scale in all inputs, private and public, for the years 1947-2005 but also that the private fixed capital stock is more important to the aggregate private production process than either of the two measures of the public fixed capital stock.