Do Interest Rates Explain Disaggregate Commodity Price Growth?

The storage at a loss paradox - inventories despite an inadequate spot-futures price spread to cover storage costs - is an unresolved issue of long-standing interest to economists. Alternative explanations include risk premiums for futures market speculators, convenience yields from holding inventories, and mismeasurement/aggregation of data. Statistical analyses of regional- and elevator-level data suggest that aggregation can impact results, and that soybean price behavior is generally consistent with inter-temporal arbitrage conditions, while corn price behavior points to convenience yields at longer horizons.