In 1997 the Chicago Mercantile Exchange replaced its live hog futures contract with a cash settlement mechanism based on a Lean Hog Index. Although cash settlement was expected to increase the use of the contract as a hedging tool, producers and packers are concerned that convergence between...

An empirical methodology is developed for statistically testing the hedging effectiveness among competing futures contracts. The presented methodology is based on the encompassing principle, widely used in the forecasting literature, and applied here to minimum variance hedging regressions....