Agricultural risk managers need forecasts of price volatility that are accurate and meaningful. This is especially true given the greater emphasis on firm level risk measurement and management (e.g., Value-at-Risk and Enterprise Risk Management). Implied volatility is known to provide a readily...

Cash forward contracting is a common, and often preferred, means of managing price risk for agribusinesses. Despite this, little is known about the performance of cash forward markets, in particular the role they play in price discovery. The lumber market provides a unique case for examining...

Myers and Thompson (1989) pioneered the concept of a generalized approach to estimating hedge ratios, pointing out that the model specification could have a large impact on the hedge ratio estimated. While a huge empirical literature exists on estimating hedge ratios, the literature is lacking a...

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's Commitments of Traders data are examined. Non-commercial positions are thought to contain the least amount of measurement error. Although non-commercials comprise a relatively small percent of the tested markets' open interest (10% to 22%), they have...

The study examines the impacts of implementing mandatory country of origin labeling (COOL) on producer and consumer welfare in the U.S. meat industry. The equilibrium displacement model developed in this study includes twenty-nine equations representing retail-, processing-, and farm-level...

It is commonly asserted that speculative buying by index funds in commodity futures andover–the–counter derivatives markets created a ‘‘bubble’’ in commodity prices, with the resultthat prices, and crude oil prices, in particular, far exceeded fundamental values at the peak.The...

This study presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the distribution of generic advertising benefits across individual producers. We develop a closed-economy partial equilibrium model that allows for the presence of producer heterogeneity in supply response. Analytical results indicate...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of bilateral imperfect competition between processors and retailers and of import supply on optimal advertising intensity, advertising expenditures, and checkoff assessment rates. First, comparative static analyses were conducted on the newly...

The first decade of the 21st century has perhaps witnessed more structural change in commodity futures markets than all previous decades combined. Not only have trading volumes and open interest increased markedly, but this time period also saw historic changes in both trading and participants....