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....

The traditional necessary condition for futures market inefficiency is the existence of alternative forecasting methods that produce mean squared forecast errors smaller than the futures market. Here, a more exacting requirement for futures market efficiency is proposed-forecast encompassing....

The paper shows that in a comparison between supermarket channels (working via dedicated wholesalers) and traditional channels, farmers selling to supermarkets tend to be in the upper-end of the "small farmer" category (whereas the traditional-channel growers are in the smaller end), have more...

The rise of supermarkets in Kenya has given rise to a new group of medium-sized farms managed by well-educated farmers. Focusing on kale, the essay shows that nearly all supermarket-channel farmers have the capacity to supply larger volumes year round and have transportation vehicles, an...

Supermarkets are rapidly penetrating urban food retail in Kenya and spreading well beyond their initial tiny market niche into the food markets of lower-income groups. Having penetrated processed and staple food markets much earlier and faster than fresh foods, they have recently begun to make...

Theoretical noise trader models suggest that uninformed traders can impact market prices. However, these models' conclusions depend crucially on the assumed specification for noise trader demand. This research seeks to empirically determine the appropriate demand specification for uninformed...

Mailbox milk prices from a representative dairy operation in Illinois are used to gauge the farm-level hedging effectiveness of Class III milk futures. The results indicate a hedge ratio of 0.85 can reduce price risk by over 90%. The importance of seasonal basis components is highlighted.