The performance and economic value of public outlook forecasts has been of continuing interest to agricultural economists and market participants. This dissertation provide new and powerful evidence on the performance of outlook forecasts relative to futures prices in hog and cattle markets over...

This paper investigates whether the accuracy of outlook hog price forecasts can be improvedusing composite forecasts in an out-of-sample context. Price forecasts from four wellrecognizedoutlook programs are combined with futures-based forecasts, ARIMA, andunrestricted Vector Autoregressive (VAR)...

Surveys of Professional Forecasters produce precise and timely point forecasts for key macroeconomic variables. However, the accompanying density forecasts are not as widely utilized, and there is no consensus about their quality. This is partly because such surveys are often conducted for...

En este artículo se introducen nuevos esquemas de ponderación para promediar de modelos econométricos cuando se está interesado en combinar predicciones de variables discretas provenientes de modelos con cambios de régimen markoviano. En una aplicación empírica, se pronostican los puntos...

Replaced with revised version of paper 11/17/06. Former title: Forecasting Food Price Inflation, Challenges for Central Banks in Developing Countries using an Inflation Targeting Framework: the Case of Colombia

This dissertation presents two essays on Markov-Switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The first essay is "Perturbation Methods for Markov-Switching Models," which is co-authored with Juan Rubio-Ramirez, Dan Waggoner, and Tao Zha. This essay develops an perturbation-based...

We use a general Markov switching model to examine the relationships between returns over three different asset classes: financial assets (U.S. stocks and Treasury bonds), commodities (oil and gold) and real estate assets (U.S. Case-Shiller index). We confirm the existence of two distinct...

The analytical framework proposed by Davis and Blake (1956) divides the process of reproduction into three elements: (i) exposure to the risk of pregnancy, (ii) the ability to conceive and (iii) successful gestation. This paper is concerned with the first element. Data from the 1973 National...

The knowledge of the overall willingness-to-pay and the specific price premiums consumers accept when buying foods with less fat, saturated fat, sodium, sugar and more fiber shapes food manufacturer and distributor marketing strategies and supports the development of public health strategies....

The paper examines profitability and market performance of small-scale fish traders selected randomly from a cross-section of nine fish markets in four districts in Central Uganda. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire which was designed to solicit information on traders?...