Presumed portfolio benefits of commodities and the availability of index fund-type investment products increase attractiveness of commodity markets for financial traders. But resulting “index trading” strategies are suspected to inflate commodity prices above their fundamental value. We use...

Prices transmit information regarding the underlying quality of a product; when quality is unknown to both buyers and sellers, theory predicts that the same price should be charged for all products. However, in the Thoroughbred industry, difference fees are charged to breed to freshman sires,...

Many Thoroughbred stallions are being bred to increasing numbers of mares. This practice raises the question of how progeny value is affected by an increased supply of foals by the same sire, which ultimately influences the sire’s value. This paper addresses that question. Three of the...

We examine the role that habit plays when producers determine their hedge ratio. Data were collected from U.S. cotton growers in which they indicated their hedging position in 2001 and 2002 as well as their perceived profitability, land ownership structure, and income. To account for...

Pricing and technological innovation are discussed within the context of the beef industry’s value-based marketing initiative. Cash and contract marketing practices for fed cattle are addressed with respect to slaughter volume and pricing methods (live, dressed, and grid). A methodology...

The addition of commodities to financial portfolios and resulting weight adjustments may create volatility linkages between commodity and financial markets, especially during financial crises. Also, biofuel mandates are suspected to integrate agricultural and energy markets. We calculate...

We develop a Bayesian estimation framework for non-stationary Markov models for situations where both sample data on observed transitions between states (micro data) and population data, where only the proportion of individuals in each state is observed (macro data), are available. Posterior...

Regression models of Farm Service Agency borrower net worth, debt-to-asset ratio, and loan servicing actions over an average seven-year period following loan origination are estimated to identify determinants of borrower financial progress over time. Results show significantly increasing net...

This paper presents a Bayesian alternative to Generalized Maximum Entropy (GME) and Generalized Cross Entropy (GCE) methods for deriving solutions to econometric models represented by underdetermined systems of equations. For certain types of econometric model specifications, the Bayesian...

The primary objective of this paper is to estimate behavioural parameters of the quadratic regional supply models in the modelling system CAPRI, using the time series data in the CAPRI database. A secondary objective is to replace the constant yields of the original model by functions that...