This article examines the puzzle of why futures prices continue to react to USDA crop reports despite the fact that reports appear to be no longer "newsworthy," that is, provide no better production estimates than private forecasts. The information value of reports is measured in terms of their...

This article examines the puzzle of why futures prices continue to react to USDA crop reports despite the fact that reports appear to be no longer “newsworthy,” that is, provide no better production estimates than private forecasts. The information value of reports is measured in terms of...

Meat and poultry recalls, while voluntary, are carried out under governmental oversight. If firms have financial incentives to avoid being implicated in a recall situation, governmental involvement in recalls may cause firms to internalize social costs when making investment decisions concerning...

Price dynamics for North American oriented strand board markets are examined. The role of transactions costs are explored vis-à-vis the law of one price. Nonlinearities induced by unobservable transactions costs are modeled by estimating time-varying smooth transition autoregressions...

This paper explores the behavior of real commodity prices over a 50--year period. Attention is given to how the shifting means for various commodity prices have changed with a special emphasis on behavior since the mid 2000s. To identify structural changes in commodity prices, we estimate...

The linearity of the U.S. hog-corn cycle has been questioned by <link rid="b4">Chavas and Holt (1991)</link>. Even so, attempts have not been made to model the potential nonlinear dynamics in the hog-corn cycle by using regime-switching models. One popular alternative is <link rid="b43">Teräsvirta's</link> smooth transition autoregressive...

This article extends the recent literature on the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of a long-run decline in the relative prices of primary commodities. Our main innovation is testing for and estimating nonlinear alternatives to a secular deterioration. Specifically, we use bootstrap procedures to test...

In recent years, the theoretical restrictions of consumer demand have been examined in post-sample forecasting exercises. However, this work has uniformly ignored associated curvature restrictions. In this paper we evaluate a series of Normalized Quadratic Inverse Demand System (NQIDS)...

This article extends the recent literature on the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of a long-run decline in the relative prices of primary commodities. Our main innovation is testing for and estimating nonlinear alternatives to a secular deterioration. Specifically, we use bootstrap procedures to test...