Commodity storage models, developed first within agricultural economics in the tradition of Gustafson (1958) , are valuable in helping us understand how prices of storable commodity markets behave, and how they respond to policy interventions. They show that the policy-relevant dynamic effects...

The complexity of managing physical and financial risk throughout the commodity production, processing and merchandising chain presents numerous challenges. To solve this problem commercials are increasingly turning to Energy and Commodity Transaction Risk Management (E/CTRM) systems. Still,...

Long-only commodity futures returns have been very disappointing over the last decade, leading some to wonder if it was a mistake to invest in commodities. The poor performance is the result of poor “income returns” and not of falling commodity prices. This observation may be surprising for...

This paper uses data on farmers' price expectations from a survey of randomly sampled smallholder farmers in Mozambique. Survey data show that across all crops most interviewed farmers expect prices to be higher in the lean season. Yet, farmers report selling most of their output shortly after...

should the prevailing market price be below the pre-specified MSP. In this paper, we consider a market consisting of infinitesimally small, rational, and strategic farmers(with heterogeneous production costs) who face market and yield uncertainties. Our equilibrium analysis reveals that (i)...

This paper extends the work of Pindyck [1] by taking into consideration a large class family of different utility functions of economic agents. As in Pindyck [1], instead of considering a social utility function that is characterized by constant relative risk aversion (C.R.R.A), we use the...

Commodity price volatility in international markets has been used to justify numerous policy interventions, including the need for buffer stocks and counter-cyclical payments. The common measure of volatility, the standard deviation or coefficient of variation, likely overstates the actual...

For many low-income countries, the impact of structural reforms on economic growth and poverty alleviation crucially depends on the response of aggregate agricultural supply to changing incentives. Despite its policy relevance, the size of this parameter is still largely unknown. This paper...

Credit risk measurement and management become more important in all financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis and the global recession. This particularly applies to most of the complex structured financing forms whose risk cannot be quantified with com-mon rating...