The study uses the 2005 Nielsen Homescan panel data to estimate price premiums and discounts associated with product attributes, market factors, and consumer characteristics, focusing on the organic attribute for 5 major fresh fruits and 5 major fresh vegetables in the United States. The results...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the marketing performance of wheat farmers in Illinois and Kansas over 1982-2004. The results show that farmer benchmark prices for wheat in Illinois and Kansas fall in the middle-third of the price range about half to three-quarters of the time....

Existing literature predominantly assumes perfect knowledge of production methods when deriving optimal futures position hedging rules. This paper relaxes this assumption and recognizes situations where producers interested in hedging may not know the exact input mix that will subsequently be...

Liquidity costs in futures markets are not observed directly because bids and offers occur in an open outcry pit and are not recorded. Traditional estimation of these costs has focused on bidask spreads using transaction prices. However, the bid-ask spread only captures the tightness of the...

This study investigates the predictability of outlook hog price forecasts released by Iowa State University relative to alternative market and time-series forecasts. The findings suggest that predictive performance of the outlook hog price forecasts can be improved substantially. Under RMSE,...

Studies of hog industry structure often invoke risk reduction and transaction costs explanations for empirical observations but fail to directly examine the core concepts of risk behavior and transaction costs theories. Using a more unified conceptual framework and unique survey and accounting...

This paper investigates the dynamics of sequential decision-making in agricultural futures and options markets. Analysis of trading records of 12 traders identified considerable heterogeneity in individual dynamic trading behavior. Using risk measures derived from the deltas and vegas of...

It is well documented that “unanticipated” information contained in USDA crop reports induces large price reactions in corn and soybean markets. Thus, a natural question that arises from this literature is: To what extent are futures hedges able to remove or reduce increased price risk...

Long-only commodity index funds have been blamed by other futures market participants for inflating commodity prices, increasing market volatility, and distorting historical price relationships. Much of this criticism is leveled without any formal empirical support or even cursory data analyses....

Most financial asset returns exhibit volatility persistence. We investigate this phenomenon in the context of daily returns in commodity futures markets. We show that the time gap between the arrival of news to the markets and the delivery time of futures contracts is the fundamental variable in...