Farm management skills can affect farm managers' performance. In this article, farm management performance is analyzed based on yearly Illinois Farm Business Farm Management (FBFM) panel data across 6,760 farms from 1996 through 2011. Two out-of-sample measures of skill are used to analyze the...

Periodically, events occur in the domestic and global economies that remind agriculturaleconomists that macroeconomics matter. This was evident in the early 1980s when theFederal Reserve responded to double-digit inflation by driving interest rates to post–World War II period highs. The Asian...

The prevalence of non-monetary transactions (NMT) in the Ukrainian economyis a phenomenon attributable to its transition to a market system. Major types ofNMT are barter transactions, offsets and payment in kind. Non-monetary transactionsare widespread in agriculture.The aim of this research is...

The understanding of how allocation decisions can maximise the economic returns to the community from water for irrigation has received little attention, but is a significant issue for regional councils, those interested in water allocation policy development, and for irrigated farmers. There is...

This article tests the efficiency of the hog options market and assesses the impact of the 1996 contract redesign on efficiency. We find that the hog options market is efficient, but some options yielded excess returns during the live hogs period but not during the lean hogs period. Our findings...

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...

This study examines the systematic risk present in major crops for the United States andthree corn-belt states. An index of commodities is used in conjunction with cash receiptsto generate dynamic estimates of the systematic risk for each crop and state. In our study,we find that beta estimates...

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...