Despite extensive literature on contributing factors to the high commodity prices and volatility in the recent years, few have examined these causal factors together in one analysis.We quantify empirically the relative importance of three factors: global demand, speculation, and energy...

Motivated by strong comovement and increasing volatility of energy and agricultural prices, we examine dynamic evolutions of ethanol, gasoline, and corn prices over the period of March 2005-March 2011. A structural change is found around March 2008 in the pairwise dynamic correlations between...

Despite a large number of studies that examine the influence of biofuels and biofuel policy on commodity prices, the impact of biofuel policy on commodity price variability is poorly understood. A good understanding of biofuel policy’s impact on price variability is important for mitigating...

High commodity prices have increased interest in the impacts of federal ethanol policies. We present a stochastic, short-run structural model of U.S. corn, ethanol, and gasoline markets to estimate the price and welfare impacts of alternative policies on producers and consumers of corn, ethanol,...

The outlook for U.S. corn markets is inextricably linked to what happens to the U.S. ethanol industry, which depends, in turn, on the level of government subsidies and mandates. We develop a stochastic partial equilibrium model to simulate outcomes for the corn market for the 2008/09 marketing...

Despite the growing importance of biofuels, the effect of biofuels on fossil fuel markets is not fully understood. We develop a joint structural Vector Auto Regression (VAR) model of the global crude oil, US gasoline, and US ethanol markets to examine whether the US ethanol market has had any...

We estimate the demand for imported cotton in China and assess the competitiveness of cotton-exporting countries. Given the assertion that African cotton producers are ill affected by U.S. cotton subsidies, our focus is the price competition between the C4 countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad...

We explicitly measure corn acreage response to the biofuels boom from 2006 to 2010. Specifically, we use newly available micro-scale planting data over time to test whether corn cultivation intensifies in proportion to the proximity of ethanol processors. We control for the endogeneity of plant...