The meat processing industry is a significant contributor to the Australian economy. It generates substantial employment and export earnings. Hence, the growth of the meat processing industry is an important issue for Australia. The meat processing industry and its share in total Australian...

A stochastic distance function frontier was estimated using data from a national survey of organic farmers to evaluate the effect of farm-specific attributes on efficiency. Farm-specific and regional variables that shift efficiency were incorporated into the multioutput distance function,...

This manuscript investigates the productivity-industrial concentration relationship in U.S. food industries. We identify a critical level of industrial concentration beyond which its relationship with productivity growth becomes negative. The welfare effects of an increase in concentration -...

This paper introduces a simple method of price risk decomposition that determines the extent to which producer price risk is attributable to volatile inter-market margins, intra-day variation, intra-week (day of week) variation, or seasonality. We apply the method to livestock markets in...

Forecasting feeder cattle basis has long been difficult because of the myriad factors that influence basis, including input and output prices and lot characteristics. This research draws upon knowledge of the various factors that influence cash feeder cattle prices to develop hedonic feeder...

Optimal hedge ratios are estimated for various weights of feeder cattle in four cash markets based on CME data from 1992 to 1999. Three-month uniform hedges are simulated for every weight, contract, and cash market combination. Hedging effectiveness is compared empirically across locations to...