The addition of commodities to financial portfolios and resulting weight adjustments may create volatility linkages between commodity and financial markets, especially during financial crises. Also, biofuel mandates are suspected to integrate agricultural and energy markets. We calculate...

Peanut paste/butter consumption frequency in the Republic of Uganda is analyzed using a household survey data. Estimation results from Zero-inflated Binomial regression conclude that education, household location, color of peanut paste, etc. are important. The ordinal logistic results conclude...

The magnitude of basis risk between Actual Production History (APH) and Group Risk Plan (GRP) contracts across corn farms in Illinois counties is estimated using pseudo-simulated yields with farm specific geospatial climate data. A two-step hierarchical Bayes small area estimator was used to...

While there is increasing interest in reducing obesity, relatively few of these efforts focus on rural communities. A multi-tiered model to reduce obesity risk factors was developed and implemented to change food behavior and health awareness in a rural West Texas community over a one year...

We develop a method to characterize the location as well as the time of approach of optimal steady states in single-state, infinite-horizon, autonomous models. The method is based on a simple function of the state variable which is defined in terms of the model's primitives. The actual...

We develop a Bayesian estimation framework for non-stationary Markov models for situations where both sample data on observed transitions between states (micro data) and population data, where only the proportion of individuals in each state is observed (macro data), are available. Posterior...

Improved software now makes Bayesian estimation a strong alternative to nonlinear maximum likelihood. Bayesian methods were used to estimate a linear response stochastic plateau for cotton and were shown to provide estimates similar to maximum likelihood. Optimal levels of nitrogen were lower...

Constant research efforts have been undertaken to create and adopt soybean varieties and farming practices that would lead to more drought-tolerant crops. Given that drought-tolerant crops are more stable in terms of price and supply, private genetic companies invest in those genetic materials...

During the financial downturn of 2008, asset classes that investors traditionally found to have low correlation with U.S. stocks became more highly correlated at the most inopportune time. Post-downturn, investors increasingly looked for alternative assets that offer diversification benefits,...