In 2004, Congress ended the sixty-six-year-old federal tobacco program, effectively deregulating production and prices. With deregulation came a buyout package, with cigarette manufacturers agreeing to pay more than $3 billion in present value to quota owners and farmers. While the dollar values...

We develop a new event-study technique, the distributional event response model (DERM), appropriate to relatively slowly evolving information events. We apply the model to twelve years of daily lumber futures prices and analyze the effects of three different types of information releases: ("a")...

With 16 years of daily lumber futures prices, we study the effects of different types of information releases: (1) monthly housing starts estimates, (2) aperiodic administrative and judicial announcements about U.S.-Canada trade disputes, and (3) novel and unprecedented court decisions related...

At sales out breeding bulls, prospective buyers have strong incentives to undertake presale measurement activities. To reduce these transaction costs, sellers often provide information on sale bulls. We examine the information content of two measures of the expected performance of the bulls and...

We develop a new event-study technique, the distributional event response model (DERM), appropriate to relatively slowly evolving information events. We apply the model to twelve years of daily lumber futures prices and analyze the effects of three different types of information releases: (a)...

In 2004, Congress ended the sixty-six-year-old federal tobacco program, effectively deregulating production and prices. With deregulation came a buyout package, with cigarette manufacturers agreeing to pay more than $3 billion in present value to quota owners and farmers. While the dollar values...

The paper analyzes recent changes in U.S. peanut policy as enacted in the 2002 Farm Security Act. A model representing the impact of the 2002 farm bill on the domestic and foreign prices of edible peanuts is constructed and the gains and losses to peanut producing states are measured.

Recent lumber price volatility has been attributed to Spotted Owl Litigation and U.S.-Canada trade disputes. We use intervention analysis to explain daily lumber futures price volatility based on these events and other factors. The way information enters the market is shown to affect the speed...

In his 1973 paper, Steven Cheung discredited the "fable of the bees" by demonstrating that markets for beekeeping services exist and that they function well. Although economists heeded Cheung's lessons, policy makers did not. The honey program�-the stated purpose of which was to promote the...