Paper for presentation at the Northeastern Agricultural & Resource Economics Association’s Workshop on Economics and Child Nutrition Programs, AAEA & NAREA Joint Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 23, 2011.

This study describes the development of bio economic models examining the economic and water quality impact of various proposed policy options in the Upper Waikato catchment. In the first phase nitrogen emissions are determined for representative farming systems using the Overseer nutrient...

This paper assessed the effects of transactions costs—relative to price and non-price factors—on smallholder marketed surplus and input use in Kenya. A selectivity model was used that accounts not only for the effects of fixed and variable transactions costs but also for the role of assets,...

This paper investigates the dynamics of sequential decision-making in agricultural futures andoptions markets using a quantile regression framework. Analysis of trading records of 12 traderssuggests that there is great heterogeneity in individual trading behavior. Traders responddifferently to...

We study the difference in the volatility dynamics of CBOT corn, soybeans, and oatsfutures prices across different delivery horizons via the smoothed Bayesian estimatorof Karali, Dorfman, and Thurman (2010). We show that the futures price volatilitiesin these markets are affected by the...

The paper examines empirical returns from holding thirty- and ninety-day call and put positions,and the forecasting performance of implied volatility in the live and feeder cattle optionsmarkets. In both markets, implied volatility is an upwardly biased and inefficient predictor ofrealized...

Grain prices have risen sharply since 2005 and 2006 affecting livestock markets by increasingfeed prices and leading to significant volatility shocks. The high price levels and magnitude ofsustained high volatilities has raised concerns for many sectors of the economy, in particularthose with...

Taken together, studies that examine how well commodity futures marketsperform find that risk premiums are common—and so unbiasedness is not—and marketsare not uniformly efficient across commodities or forecast horizons. This large body ofresearch sheds important light on whether and to what...

Hedging effectiveness is the proportion of price risk removed through hedging. Empiricalhedging studies typically estimate a set of risk minimizing hedge ratios, estimate the hedgingeffectiveness statistic, apply the estimated hedge ratios to a second group of data, and examinethe robustness of...

The commodity bull cycle of 2006-2008 and subsequent dramatic price decline have been asource of hardship for traditional commodity market participants such as producers andmerchant/shippers. The usefulness of futures markets has been called into question, especiallygiven that some market...