Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between food security and cleaner energy and evaluate the financial viability of both ethanol and biodiesel productions in Southern Brazil, the current battleground region among food, ethanol and biodiesel. Southeastern Brazil...

This paper examines the roles of futures prices of crude oil, gasoline, ethanol, corn, soybeans and sugar in the energy-grain nexus. It also investigates the own- and cross-market impacts for lagged grain trading volume and open interest in the energy and grain markets. According to the results,...

We present a new framework to identify supply elasticities of storable commodities where past shocks are used as exogenous price shifters. In the agricultural context, past yield shocks change inventory levels and futures prices of agricultural commodities. We use our estimated elasticities to...

U.S. retail food price increases in recent years may seem large in nominal terms, but after adjusting for inflation have been quite modest even after the change in U.S. biofuel policies in 2006. In contrast, increases in the real prices of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice received by U.S. farmers...

In the absence of an infrastructure for the harvest, storage and purchase of cellulosic biomass, contracting is an important mechanism through which biorefineries can ensure adequate feedstock supply. We develop an optimization model to assess the economic potential of dedicated energy crops...

This paper investigates the cost of biomass co-firing in European coal power stations. We propose a tractable and original method, that enables us to get expressions of biomass and CO2 breakeven points for co-firing in different types of coal plants. We call them carbon switching price and...

We estimate dynamic conditional correlations between 10 commodities futures returns in energy, metals and agriculture markets over the period 1998-2014 with a DCC-GARCH model. We look at the factors influencing those correlations, adopting a pooled mean group (PMG) estimator. Macroeconomic...

Brazil is the only sizable economy to date to have developed a home-grown ubiquitously-retailed alternative to fossil fuels in light road transportation: ethanol from sugar cane. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the uptake of flexible-fuel vehicles (FFVs) has been tremendous. Five years after their...

Cryptocurrencies are hidden monies that are specifically created to be used asdigital currencies while assuming the characteristics of real money. Barringthe divergent opinions on whether permitted in Islamic law (that is/are halal)or forbidden in Islamic law (that is/are haram), and for which...

Renewable energy consumption has been identified as a potential solution to the intermittent power supply in Ghana. Recently, a Renewable Energy Act has been passed which has a target of 10% of renewable energy component in Ghana’s energy mix by 2020. Whilst effort is been made to enhance...