Replaced with revised version of paper 07/18/08.

The last three years have realized significant structural changes in the U.S. agricultural policy environment. These changes include nearly complete planting flexibility and the elimination of target-price-based income support for agricultural producers. Many have questioned the extent to which...

The extent to which crop insurance programs have resulted in additional land being brought into production has been a topic of considerable debate. We extend a multi-equation structural model of crop acreage response, insurance participation, CRP enrollment, and input usage developed in Goodwin...

Recent empirical research and development in the cattle industry suggest several reasons to suspect structural change in economic relationships determining cattle prices. Standard forecasting models may ignore structural change and may produce biased and misleading forecasts. Vector...

In the US forestry industry, wildfire has always been one of the leading causes of damage. This topic is of growing interest as wildfire has caused huge losses for landowners, residents and governments in recent years. While individual wildfire behavior is well studied (e.g. Butry 2009; Holmes...

This paper discusses the volatility spillover effects in agricultural commodity markets, via studying implied volatilities derived from nearby options contracts. Using weekly averaged data from corn and soybean markets after 2003, a vector autoregressive (VAR) model is estimated, and impulse...

Our study focuses on modeling southern pine beetle (SPB) outbreaks in the southern area. The approach is to evaluate SPB outbreak frequency in a spatio-temporal framework. A block bootstrapping method with zero-inflated estimation has been proposed to construct a statistical model accounting for...

This paper determines the dynamic interaction between prices of corn, soybean, grain sorghum (milo), wheat, feeder cattle and live (fed) cattle by taking into account the surge in corn consumption stemming from the boost of mandated ethanol production. Corn is a major carbohydrate-feed component...

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/28/11.

Cattle feeding enterprises operate amid variability originating in prices and production. Thisresearch explicitly models yield risks related to cattle feeding by relating the mean and varianceof yield performance factors to observable conditioning variables. The results demonstratethat pen...