Generic dairy promotion is big business. The 1983 Dairy and Tobacco Adjustment Act requires that all dairy farmers pay a promotion assessment of 15 cents per hundredweight on all milk sold commercially. Of the total assessment, up to 10 cents may be retained locally to fund regional or state...

This paper investigates the dynamics of sequential decision-making in agricultural futures andoptions markets using a quantile regression framework. Analysis of trading records of 12 traderssuggests that there is great heterogeneity in individual trading behavior. Traders responddifferently to...

The paper examines empirical returns from holding thirty- and ninety-day call and put positions,and the forecasting performance of implied volatility in the live and feeder cattle optionsmarkets. In both markets, implied volatility is an upwardly biased and inefficient predictor ofrealized...

This paper investigates whether the accuracy of outlook hog price forecasts can be improvedusing composite forecasts in an out-of-sample context. Price forecasts from four wellrecognizedoutlook programs are combined with futures-based forecasts, ARIMA, andunrestricted Vector Autoregressive (VAR)...

A Monte Carlo investigation is used to examine the performance of two commonly used tests for Granger causality for univariate and bivariate nonstationary ARMA (p,q) processes. Tests are applied to raw data, first differences of the raw data, and detrended versions of the series. The results...