The economic value of public situation and outlook information has long been a subject of debate. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic value of USDA WASDE reports in corn and soybean markets. The investigation is based on event study analysis, with the "events" consisting of...

This study uses quantile regressions to estimate historical forecast error distributions forWASDE forecasts of corn, soybean, and wheat prices, and then compute confidencelimits for the forecasts based on the empirical distributions. Quantile regressions with fiterrors expressed as a function of...

The purpose of this report is to improve understanding of USDA crop forecasting methods, performance and market impact. A review of USDA's forecasting procedures and methodology confirmed the objectivity and consistency of the forecasting process over time. No changes in methodology occurred in...

This study investigates empirical methods of generating prediction intervals for WASDE forecasts of corn, soybean, and wheat prices over the 1980/81 through 2006/07 marketing years. Empirical methods use historical forecast errors to estimate forecast error distributions, which are then used to...

The lack of consistently acceptable convergence performance for Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) corn, soybean, and wheat contracts since late 2005 has been widely discussed (e.g., Henriques, 2008).1 Convergence performance is summarized in Figure 1, depicting delivery location basis levels on the...

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a number of agencies that are involved in collecting, analyzing, forecasting, and disseminating information about the production and consumption of the corn and soybean crops (Spilka, 1983; Vogel and Bange, 1999; Lusk, 2013). Market participants...

This study sought to determine whether monthly revisions of U.S. Department of Agriculture current-year corn and soybean yield forecasts are correlated and whether this correlation is associated with crop size. An ex-ante measure of crop size based on percent deviation of the current estimate...