Both options and better information about prices have been proposed to increase the attractiveness of livestock hedging strategies. This study examines the value of incorporating both into hedging strategies for live hogs. A two-period simulation model in which a hog producer chooses a hedging...

The hog industry is the largest component of the Spanish livestock sector and developments in this industry affect the entire Spanish agricultural sector. Spain's recent entry into the European Community which was accompanied by falling producer prices generated considerable concern over the...

This is a comprehensive study of the growth and impact of agricultural futures market traders. The growth of financial investment in commodities has introduced participants and raised both new questions and warranted revisiting old questions; these include the impact on commodity prices, the...

Midwest agriculture depends heavily on corn, soybean, and wheat production which requires considerable diesel fuel to meet producer output objectives. An ability to anticipate fuel price movements may allow producers, farm managers, and fuel distributors to better plan their transactions to...

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine further the factors that influencefarmers’ decisions to participate in crop insurance programs. The factors consideredare RMA rules and farmers’ yield perceptions. In particular, the first paperexamined the role of Risk Management Agency’s...

The performance and economic value of public outlook forecasts has been of continuing interest to agricultural economists and market participants. This dissertation provide new and powerful evidence on the performance of outlook forecasts relative to futures prices in hog and cattle markets over...

This study investigates the reaction of the frozen pork bellies futures market to the release of inventory information. Knight-Ridder releases their analysts' forecasts of the USDA estimate two days prior to the estimate provided by the USDA. A rational expectations model is developed to study...

Producers have a wide variety of risk management instruments available. How do producers make a choice of risk management instruments? Using the recently developed choice bracketing framework, we examine what risk management strategies producers use and identify the factors that drive their risk...

Recent research has provided mixed results regarding the presence of a time-varying risk premium in agricultural futures markets. In this paper we test for the presence of a time-varying risk premium and market efficiency focusing on the properties of the underlying data. Specifically, we...

In this paper we study futures market depth by examining the price path due to order imbalances thereby allowing us to directly gain insight in the execution costs due to a lack of market depth We propose a two dimensional market depth measure in which the price path due to order imbalances is...