Prices for Choice and Select grade fed cattle are derived from wholesale and retail beef markets. Choice-Select price discounts are a key component of fed cattle pricing, whether packers purchase fed cattle on a live weight, dressed weight, or grid. This study identifies supply, demand, and...

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/04/09.

Reduced reliance on cash market prices for fed cattle and hogs raise questions about the role of cash prices in price discovery. We use seven years of weekly data from mandatory price reports to determine whether or not cash market prices are cointegrated with other procurement prices and then...

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...

Captive supplies have been a contentious issue in the livestock industry for fifteen years and the subject of both theoretical and empirical research. In 2001, mandatory price reporting was implemented. One objective by its proponents was to increase the amount of information available on...

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...

Consumers reveal preferences for fresh beef attributes through their retail beef purchases. Hedonic pricing methods were used to estimate the value consumers place on observable characteristics of fresh beef products, especially on retail beef brands. Primary data were collected from 65 randomly...