In processing industries, plant location decisions are costly and have consequences for firm profitability. When raw materials are heavy or perishable, transportation costs limit shipping distances and processors must compete locally for raw material inputs. To determine the likely profitability...

Embora os produtores de gado nem sempre se comportem como uma empresa, precisam agir como tal para se manter no mercado, cada vez mais concentrado e profissionalizado nas etapas seguintes à de engorda – industrialização, atacado e varejo. O desafio para o pecuarista é grande, dada a...

We find sale prices and net revenues received by sellers in the Midwestern club pig market are higher at traditional face-to-face auctions than at comparable Internet auctions. The comparison overcomes adverse selection issues that commonly plague such analyses by using data from sellers that...

The increasing use of production contracts in the hog sector has reduced the number of spot market transactions, raised concerns about price manipulation and helped to spur legislation requiring price reporting by packers. Using data from the 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Agriculture, this study...

In recent decades there has been a substantial increase in the scale of production and the use of production contracts in the hog sector. This paper explores empirically whether these two phenomena are related by examining whether the use of production contracts has allowed finish hog operations...

This paper explores the factors that impact insurance choices. Specially designed survey questions allow one to fully observe the demand tendency by the farmers and partially observe the supply tendency by the insurance company. A joint estimation of insurance decision by both supply and demand...

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)...