The paper examines empirical returns from holding thirty- and ninety-day call and put positions,and the forecasting performance of implied volatility in the live and feeder cattle optionsmarkets. In both markets, implied volatility is an upwardly biased and inefficient predictor ofrealized...

The paper examines empirical returns from holding thirty- and ninety-day call and put positions, and the forecasting performance of implied volatility in the live and feeder cattle options markets. In both markets, implied volatility is an upwardly biased and inefficient predictor of realized...

This paper presents a unified treatment of the production and financial decisions available to a firm facing frictionless financial markets and a stochastic production technology under minimal assumptions on the firm's stochastic technology and objective function. The specific focus is on...

The twin problems of moral hazard and adverse selection are often blamed for the lack of insurance for many fruits and vegetables. This paper develops an alternative method of testing for adverse selection that uses a two-stage approach to determine the effects of technical inefficiency on the...

Options on agricultural futures are popular financial instruments used for agricultural price risk management and to speculate on future price movements. Poor performance of Black’s classical option pricing model has stimulated many researchers to introduce pricing models that are more...

The U.S. Geological Survey has determined that irrigation in Arkansas’ Delta is unsustainable. This study examines how irrigation restrictions would affect county net returns to cropproduction. It also considers the effect of planting less water-intensive bioenergycrops—switchgrass and...

This paper investigates the dynamics of sequential decision-making in agricultural futures andoptions markets using a quantile regression framework. Analysis of trading records of 12 traderssuggests that there is great heterogeneity in individual trading behavior. Traders responddifferently to...

We study the difference in the volatility dynamics of CBOT corn, soybeans, and oatsfutures prices across different delivery horizons via the smoothed Bayesian estimatorof Karali, Dorfman, and Thurman (2010). We show that the futures price volatilitiesin these markets are affected by the...

This study examines the systematic risk present in major crops for the United States andthree corn-belt states. An index of commodities is used in conjunction with cash receiptsto generate dynamic estimates of the systematic risk for each crop and state. In our study,we find that beta estimates...