Many studies have addressed the issues of the price relationships between spatially separated commodity markets. Such studies, which have policy relevance, provide information on the structure and the performance of the markets. Most of these studies, however, have been criticized for not...

Coffee price volatility was extreme in 1997. With no obvious drought or freezing conditions in major growing countries, market analysts blamed El Nino. Alternatively, economic theory implies that commodity price volatility should be high when inventories are low. We analyze and test these two...

Agricultural prices are determined by natural and socio-economic factors that are known to be self-similar at different time scales and to follow non-periodic cyclical patterns. These properties are most easily understood using Mandelbrot's fractal geometry, in which a jagged time series is...

This paper discusses some of the failings of expected utility including the Allais paradox and expected utility's inadequate one dimensional characterization of risk. Three alternatives to expected utility are discussed at length; weighted expected utility, rank dependent utility, and cumulative...

Standard models of hedging behavior assume that either hedgers wish to minimize net price variation or they wish to balance variation versus profits. These models treat variation as risk and fail to distinguish between variation that is random and variation that is not random over time. Newer...

The optimal hedging portfolio is shown to include both futures and options under a variety of circumstances when the marginal cost of hedging is non-zero. Futures and options are treated as substitute goods, and properties of the resulting hedging demand system are explained. The overall optimal...

Hedgers located far from organized commodity exchanges suffer the mismatch between their local prices and exchange prices. Futures and options traded on the exchange may still be valuable to distant hedgers but only to the extent that basis risk is small. Forward contracting allows hedgers to...

This article tests whether the volatility of agricultural futures prices exhibits fractional integration. Volatility series were constructed for fourteen agricultural futures price series with over 5,300 observations per series. The volatility series exhibit strong long-term dependence, which is...

Hedging strategies typically assume that hedging is costless and that only one futures market exists. When these assumptions are dropped, the demand for hedging is shown to depend on basis risk, price risk, and the hedger's risk preference. The marginal and incremental value of hedging...

A recently proposed explanation for futures price backwardation is examined. An equilibrium model with spatial heterogeneity leads to the interpretation of backwardations as mismeasurement by the analyst. However, the model predicts that backwardations are more affected by the location of stocks...