Ryoichi Ikeda

Youth-Mediated Knowledge Transfer and Data Acquisition Service for Agricultural Decision Support: A Trial for Illiterate Farmers in Vietnam

Proper technology transfer based on scientific data is inevitable for farmers to promote sustainable agriculture which is a common target of modern food production. In under-developing countries, illiteracy of farmers is one of the major reasons for them to receive sufficient information and knowledge for such sustainable food production. In this study, we conducted a trial to examine effectiveness of an idea to transfer agricultural knowledge and information to illiterate farmers through their children educated at school as messengers between their illiterate parents and remote experts by utilizing several ICT tools including a multilingual machine translator which can bridge the famers and even foreign experts.

A Structural Approach without Path Dependency

This paper proposes a structural model to price credit risk of firms with short-term and long -term debts. In Ikeda, Kobayashi, and Takahashi (2005), since it assumed that the short-term debt is refunded by issuing a new short-term debt only, the future face value of the short-term debt depends on the path of asset value, which makes analysis very complicated. In order to avoid the problem, we build a new model without path dependency by assuming the future face values of short term debts to be fixed. Furthermore, by the improvement of the model, we show that the model can apply to the pricing of credit derivatives, and present the example of the pricing of a convertible bond.