Commodity cash and futures prices have been rising steadily since 2006. As evidenced by the April 2008 Commodity Futures Trading Commission Agricultural Forum, there is much concern among traditional futures and options market participants that the usefulness of commodity derivatives has been...

Commodity and energy prices have exhibited an unprecedented increase between October 2006 and July 2008, only to fall sharply during the last months of 2008. Many explanations have been offered to this phenomenon, including steadily increasing demand from China and India, large mandated...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of the 2008 Farm Bill's average crop revenue election (ACRE) program on the risk‐reducing effectiveness of crop insurance products. Design/methodology/approach – Three crop/region combinations are examined, representing regions...

Government farm support programs such as Loan Deficiency Payments (LDP) and Counter-Cyclical Payments (CCP) have payoff structures that effectively make them costless price insurance instruments. A combination of these payments with yield insurance may provide a viable alternative to revenue...

This paper analyzes the effect of the ACRE program adopted in the final version of the 2007 Farm Bill on the risk-reducing effectiveness of insurance products. To the best of our knowledge this is a first attempt to analyze the effect of the ACRE program on the risk management decisions of crop...

Traffic flows in the U.S. have been affected by the substantial increase and, as of January 2009, decrease in biofuel production and use. This paper considers a framework to study the effect on grain transportation flows of the 2005 Energy Act and subsequent legislation, which mandated higher...

Commodity and energy prices have exhibited an unprecedented increase between October 2006 and July 2008, only to fall sharply during the last months of 2008. Many explanations have been offered to this phenomenon, including steadily increasing demand from China and India, large mandated...