Substitution of petroleum fuels with biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel has been shown to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These GHG reductions can be traded in the emerging carbon markets, and methodologies for quantifying and trading are still being developed. The main challenges in...

Crude oil price speculation during 2000s could have increased installed capacity in corn ethanol plants beyond what was warranted by the market factors. We use Muth’s commodity pricing model and Flood and Garber’s tests to test for speculative investment in US corn ethanol industry. The...

The literature on the impacts of biofuels on food prices is characterized by contradictory findings and a wide range of estimates. To bring more clarity to this issue, we review studies on U.S. corn ethanol expansion released between 2008 and 2013. Normalizing corn price impacts by the increase...

Among many, increasing the price of municipal water is considered to be the most effective mechanism for enhancing municipal water conservation, whether during times of drought or not. However, increasing the price of something that is considered to be, literally, a life-giving resource is...

Prices for prime farmland have increased significantly in recent years. But, is the dramatic increase the result of a speculative bubble or is it consistent with market fundamentals with increases driven by growing global demand and recent changes to U.S. agricultural and energy policies? This...

In this paper we examine price transmission for major agriculture (food) and energy products in China for the years 2004 to 2010. The Error correction model (ECM) and the directed acyclic graphs (DAG) are applied to identify price dynamics among these six variables: rice, wheat, corn, coal,...

This article estimates factors that impact location decisions by new ethanol plants using logistic regression analysis and spatial correlation techniques. The results indicate that location decisions are impacted by the agricultural characteristics of a county, competition, and state-level...

Using pooled regional time-series data and panel data estimation, we quantify the impact of monthly ethanol production on monthly retail regular gasoline prices. This analysis suggests that the growth in ethanol production has caused retail gasoline prices to be $0.29 to $0.40 per gallon lower...

Our paper looks at how price volatility in the Brazilian ethanol industry changes over time and across markets by using a new methodological approach suggested by Seo (2007). The main advantage of Seo’s proposal over previously existing methods is that it allows to jointly estimate the...