Economists and others need estimates of future cash price volatility to use in risk management evaluation and education programs. This paper evaluates the performance of alternative volatility forecasts for fed cattle, feeder cattle, and corn cash price returns. Forecasts include time series...

A battery of time series methods are compared for forecasting basis levels in the soybean futures complex: soybeans, soybean meal, and soybean oil. Specifically, nearby basis forecasts are generated with exponential smoothing techniques, autoregression moving average (ARMA), and vector...

This research presents a systematic and unified approach to evaluating forecast rationality that considers the potential of nonstationarity in forecasts and realized values. The approach is applied to one-quarter ahead U.S. Department of Agriculture livestock price forecasts from 1982 through...

Conditional efficiency or forecast encompassing is tested among alternative pork production forecasts using the method proposed by Harvey and Newbold. One-, two-, and three-quarter ahead pork production forecasts made by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the University of...

The distributional behavior of futures price spreads is examined for four commodities: corn, live cattle, gold and T-bonds. Remarkably different results are found over commodities, time period, and sample size. Actual spread changes for the smaller sample size of gold and T-bonds and for corn...