California specialty crop growers are exposed to extreme price volatility, as well as considerable yield volatility caused by fluctuations in temperature, precipitation, and other specific weather events. Weather derivatives do provide a promising market-based solution to managing risks for...

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 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....

Numerous empirical studies have investigated the profitability of technical trading rules in a wide variety of markets, and many of them found positive profits. Despite positive evidence about profitability and improvements in testing procedures, skepticism about technical trading profits...

This study analyzes the potential risk reduction gains from naive diversification (equal-weighting) among market advisory services for corn and soybeans. The total possible decrease in risk through naive diversification is small, mainly because advisory prices are highly correlated on average....

Marketing is viewed as an important component of the farm management process, and poor marketing is often cited as a cause of low farm incomes. However, widespread beliefs about poor performance are not based upon a large body of research, and available evidence is too limited to make definitive...

This study investigates the nature of the revision process of USDA corn and soybean production forecasts over the 1970/71 through 2002/03 marketing years. Nordhaus' framework for testing the efficiency of fixed-event forecasts is used. In this framework, efficiency is based on independence of...

The optimal hedging model has become the standard theoretical model of normative hedging behavior due to its intuitive tradeoff of expected return with risk, its effcient use of information and its easy implementation. In practice, the model can be easily implemented with the Parameter Certainty...