This paper describes the degree of marketing activeness of market advisory programs for corn and soybeans, and analyzes the relationship between activeness degree and pricing performance. The data set employed consists of advisory programs tracked by the AgMAS Project at the University of...

The economic value of public situation and outlook information has long been a subject of debate. The purpose of this study is to investigate the economic value of USDA reports in hog and cattle markets. The investigation is based on event study analysis, with the "events" consisting of the...

While the risk premium hypothesis in futures markets has been the subject of a long and continuous controversy, the risk premium hypothesis in forward markets is also of interest among economists. The hypothesis is supported by some theoretical arguments and empirical evidence yet remains an...

The storage at a loss paradox - inventories despite an inadequate spot-futures price spread to cover storage costs - is an unresolved issue of long-standing interest to economists. Alternative explanations include risk premiums for futures market speculators, convenience yields from holding...

This paper investigates the profitability of technical trading rules in US futures markets over the 1985-2004 period. To account for data snooping biases, we evaluate statistical significance of performance across technical trading rules using White's Bootstrap Reality Check test and Hansen's...

The hog option contract has served as a risk management tool for the pork industry for more than 20 years. However, very limited information exists about how this market behaves and how it was affected by the contract redesign of 1996. This paper evaluates the efficiency of hog options markets...

We model a futures exchange's clearinghouse as a "bank" holding a portfolio of credit lines available to its clearing members and collateralized with clearing margins or, equivalently, a portfolio of short European put basket options. Consequently, the "bank" model measures the clearinghouse's...