Purpose –This paper aims to explore the possible use of credit derivatives by corporate treasurers. Corporations have, in recent years, grown comfortable with the idea of using traditional derivative products to hedge their exposure to, for example, interest rate and foreign exchange risk....

We empirically address the implications of biofuel policy regarding major grains, to the subsequent evolution of the markets for calories from the three major grains, maize, wheat and rice. The implied market variables, namely, market price, consumption, and stocks, using a structurally...

This two-part study investigates potential reforms of commodity programs in the context of the legislative debate on the 1995 farm bill.

We prove the strict concavity of the value function for liquidity-constrained saving or storage models with possibly responsive effort, possibly unbounded marginal utility, and i.i.d. disturbances. Thus we furnish a foundation for empirical estimation of homogeneous Markov processes for...

Commodity storage models, developed first within agricultural economics in the tradition of Gustafson (1958), are valuable in helping us understand how prices of storable commodity markets behave, and how they respond to policy interventions. They show that the policy-relevant dynamic effects of...

In the long view, recent grain price volatility is not anomalous. Wheat, rice, and maize are highly substitutable in the global market for calories, and when aggregate stocks decline to minimal feasible levels, prices become highly sensitive to small shocks, consistent with storage models. In...