Agricultural prices are determined by natural and socio-economic factors that are known to be self-similar at different time scales and to follow non-periodic cyclical patterns. These properties are most easily understood using Mandelbrot's fractal geometry, in which a jagged time series is...

Coffee price volatility was extreme in 1997. With no obvious drought or freezing conditions in major growing countries, market analysts blamed El Nino. Alternatively, economic theory implies that commodity price volatility should be high when inventories are low. We analyze and test these two...

Standard models of hedging behavior assume that either hedgers wish to minimize net price variation or they wish to balance variation versus profits. These models treat variation as risk and fail to distinguish between variation that is random and variation that is not random over time. Newer...

Organic vegetable producers typically earn a premium over conventional producers to cover the added costs of organic production. The premium can vary greatly, making organic vegetable farming riskier than conventional farming and causing potential financial problems for new organic farming...

This study examines the relative price of a standard market basket of food items and a market basket of healthier alternatives. Because people in low-income neighborhoods may have fewer grocery stores and transportation alternatives, the effects of store size and competition on the price of a...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/30/04.

The impacts of market reforms on prices volatility in developing countries are not well understood because analysts have not been able to predict the impacts. This study investigates whether the reforms have exacerbated the degree of spatial volatility of maize price in Tanzania using ARCH-M...

A censored demand system estimator is proposed by extending the sample selection model of Heckman. Censoring is governed by a selection mechanism which avoids the restricitve Tobit parameterization. Results of application to household consumption of beverages suggest the estimator produces...

This study uses revealed preferences of consumers to study the consumer benefits from soy milk. The study specifies and estimates structural demand and reduced form models of competition for different milk types using US supermarket scanner data. The introduction of soy milk is used to estimate...

Traditional measures of the benefits of technological change use producer prices. Consumer-oriented measures are more appropriate but they require knowledge of price impacts. They may diverge in the presence of distortions. This paper shows that in general equilibrium they are interrelated...