Producers have a wide variety of risk management instruments available. How do producers make a choice of risk management instruments? Using the recently developed choice bracketing framework, we examine what risk management strategies producers use and identify the factors that drive their risk...

The economic value of public situation and outlook information has long been a subject of debate. The purpose of this study is to investigate the economic value of USDA reports in hog and cattle markets. The investigation is based on event study analysis, with the "events" consisting of the...

While the risk premium hypothesis in futures markets has been the subject of a long and continuous controversy, the risk premium hypothesis in forward markets is also of interest among economists. The hypothesis is supported by some theoretical arguments and empirical evidence yet remains an...

The optimal hedging model has become the standard theoretical model of normative hedging behavior due to its intuitive tradeoff of expected return with risk, its effcient use of information and its easy implementation. In practice, the model can be easily implemented with the Parameter Certainty...

A growing body of recent evidence suggests that premiums for financial options might be too high. For agricultural options, market participants often make similar claims, however there is very limited scientific literature to prove or disprove such claims. This research investigates the...

This paper employs a Bayesian hierarchical approach to estimate individual expected performance of market advisory programs in corn and soybeans. This estimation procedure is a conservative approach compared to traditional estimation, since it reduces estimation error in the expected gains from...

The economic value of public situation and outlook information has long been a subject of debate. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic value of USDA WASDE reports in corn and soybean markets. The investigation is based on event study analysis, with the "events" consisting of...

This study uses the newly available data from the CFTC to investigate the market impact of futures trading by large hedge funds and CTAs. Regression results show that there is a positive relationship between the trading volume of large hedge funds and CTAs and market volatility. However, a...

The hog option contract has served as a risk management tool for the pork industry for more than 20 years. However, very limited information exists about how this market behaves and how it was affected by the contract redesign of 1996. This paper evaluates the efficiency of hog options markets...

Three attributes of futures contract behavior important for market performance—liquidity, volatility, and convergence—are investigated before and after the 2005 increase in speculative position limits for corn, soybean, and wheat contracts at the Chicago Board of Trade. The analysis of...