This report analyzes the economic impact of price fixing in the wet corn milling industry on consumers in the State of Michigan. Two of the companies who produce citric acid have pleaded guilty to fixing its price. In this report we assume that price fixing also occurred among HFCS producers....

This paper addresses the question of whether the export demand for soybeans and soybean products changed structurally over the 1950 to 1992 period as the U.S. agricultural sector became more integrated with the rest of the world economy. The results suggest that export demands were stable for...

Several Caribbean sugar producing countries are actively looking for viable alternatives to recover some of the expected lost revenues due to the WTO (World Trade Organization) ruling that sugar subsidies in the European Union (EU) are illegal. One alternative worth considering is exporting...

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...

O presente artigo refere-se ao estudo e comparação dos padrões sazonais de comportamentodos preços do amendoim no período de janeiro 1996 a dezembro de 2005. Constata-se quefatores sazonais, safra e entressafra, de fato influenciam o comportamento e a oscilação depreços no mercado de...

We theoretically examine a farmer’s coverage demand with area and individual insurance plans as either separate or integrated options. The individual and area losses are assumed to be imperfectly and positively correlated. With actuarially fair rates, the farmer will fully insure with the...

The behavior of agricultural commodity markets can arguably result in markedly asymmetricprice cycles, that is, downward cycles of substantially different length and breadth thanupward cycles. This study assesses whether asymmetric-cycle models can enhance the understandingof the dynamics and...

A changing world of increasing complexity, fluctuating prices, high energy costs and limited data necessitate creative blending of economic theory and available empirical statistics to understand the welfare impacts in a specific market. In this paper, a programming approach is used in tandem...

The study explores a long memory conditional volatility model on international grain markets, demonstrating importance of modeling both temporal effects of volatility and long memory process. This study adopts six different volatility models, nested in an ARMA(p,q)- FIGARCH(P,D,Q), to capture...

Factors affecting the adoption of crop insurance, forward contracting, and spreading sales areanalyzed using multivariate and multinomial probit approaches that account for simultaneousadoption and/or correlation among the three risk management adoption decisions. Our empiricalresults suggest...