The US Environmental Protection Agency announced a waiver allowing an increase in the Fuel-Ethanol blend limit (the “blend wall” ) from 10% (E10) to 15% (E15) on October,2010.Justifications for the waiver are reduced vehicle fuel prices and less consumption of petroleum gasoline, leading to...

Since the beginning of this century, China’s annual GDP growth is over 9%. This growth is fueled by large increases in energy consumption, led by a coal-dominated energy structure, and associated with higher sulfur dioxide emissions and industry dust. In 2008, China accounted for over 17% of...

In this study, a Structural Vector Autoregression model (SVAR) is employed to decompose how supply/demand structural shocks affect food and fuel prices within fuel and corn markets. Results indicate that the relative importance of each structural shock in explaining the variation of corn prices...

Biodiesel has recently drawn attention because of its potential to make an important contribution to national energy security and the environment. However, the rapid growth of biodiesel has raised concerns about biodiesel’s impact on the price level and volatility of agricultural commodities....

Policy makers should consider price volatility effects when determining appropriate spending levels for alternative fuel programs.

The hypothesis underlying this analysis is that in the presence of volatile gasoline prices competitive market forces will yield alternative, less volatile fuels as substitutes. A real-option pricing approach was employed for this analysis by modeling investment under uncertainty for the case of...

The real advantage of receiving a Southern Agricultural Economics Association Lifetime Achievement award is the ability to make this presentation and have it published without having to deal with editors and referees. This provides a certain license of freedom to abstract outside the box without...