The purpose of this paper is to investigate the marketing performance of wheat farmers in Illinois and Kansas over 1982-2004. The results show that farmer benchmark prices for wheat in Illinois and Kansas fall in the middle-third of the price range about half to three-quarters of the time....

This study suggests that confidence intervals for WASDE forecasts of corn, soybean, and wheat prices may be improved if they are estimated using an empirical approach. Empirical confidence intervals are calculated following Williams and Goodman's (1971) method and use historical forecast errors...

This paper employs a Bayesian hierarchical approach to estimate individual expected performance of market advisory programs in corn and soybeans. This estimation procedure is a conservative approach compared to traditional estimation, since it reduces estimation error in the expected gains from...

This study investigates the predictability of outlook hog price forecasts released by Iowa State University relative to alternative market and time-series forecasts. The findings suggest that predictive performance of the outlook hog price forecasts can be improved substantially. Under RMSE,...

A growing body of recent evidence suggests that premiums for financial options might be too high. For agricultural options, market participants often make similar claims, however there is very limited scientific literature to prove or disprove such claims. This research investigates the...

The storage at a loss paradox of positive inventories despite inadequate spot-futures price spread coverage of storage costs is an unresolved issue of long-standing interest to economists. Alternative explanations include risk premiums for futures market speculators, convenience yields from...

Long-only commodity index funds have been blamed by other futures market participants for inflating commodity prices, increasing market volatility, and distorting historical price relationships. Much of this criticism is leveled without any formal empirical support or even cursory data analyses....