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...

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...

This paper investigates whether the accuracy of outlook hog price forecasts can be improvedusing composite forecasts in an out-of-sample context. Price forecasts from four wellrecognizedoutlook programs are combined with futures-based forecasts, ARIMA, andunrestricted Vector Autoregressive (VAR)...

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This report summarizes the financial and production records of 16 dairy farms across the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan. To be included, the farms must have produced at least 50 percent of gross cash farm income from milk and dairy animal sales. The records came from Michigan State...

In this paper, we show that relaxing credit constraints and increasing access to finance by lifting state-level restrictions on interstate bank expansions from the 1970s through the early 1990s benefited the U.S. agricultural industry by increasing farm sales and profits. In our empirical...