Conventional wisdom suggests that weekly prices at farm, wholesale, and retail levels should exhibit symmetry. Observation of asymmetrical price movements is submitted as evidence of the existence and use of "market power" at one or more levels of the market. However, application of economic...

A collection of working papers challenging the accepted paradigm that market structure determines market performance of the U.S. meat packing industry.

Conventional wisdom holds that a small and decreasing number of hog slaughter firms are using their "market power" to take advantage of U.S. hog producers. Existing studies have simply calculated industry concentration ratios and assumed/asserted that the performance of such a concentrated...

The imputed pig death loss contained in the reported monthly U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pig crop data over the December 1995–June 2006 period ranged from 24.93% to 12.75%. Clearly, there are substantial measurement errors in the USDA monthly pig crop data. In this paper, we...

A recursive, monthly price forecasting model for live; cattle serves as a basis for applying decision theory to speculation in cattle futures. The distribution of predicted futures prices is obtained from the standard error of the forecast of the cash price forecasting model in conjunction with...

Is entrepreneurship an innate ability or an acquired skill? Can entrepreneurship acumen be achieved and enhanced through education and training, or are certain people “born†to be entrepreneurs or to act entrepreneurially? Economists and management theorists give widely divergent...