The cotton harvesting industry is in the beginnings of its next technological advance, cotton harvesters that form cotton modules inside the machine then deposit them off the rows. These new machines eliminate the need for extra labor and equipment, but are more expensive than conventional...

This paper investigates, through a dynamic stochastic adjustment model the extent to which an active agricultural policy can be the source of volatility in agricultural investment. It is shown that noise in formulation of agricultural policy has adverse effects even in cases where earlier...

This Discussion Paper focuses on strategic adjustments made by leading international dairy firms in response to world market developments in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Firms whose strategies were analyzed include Fonterra, Nestle, selected other Western European companies (including the...

This paper presents a unified treatment of the production and financial decisions available to a firm facing frictionless financial markets and a stochastic production technology under minimal assumptions on the firm's stochastic technology and objective function. The specific focus is on...

The objective of this paper is to develop a cross hedging model for rice that minimizes basis risk and accounts for the existence of the nonstationary nature of basis. Basis is treated as an endogenous variable and model for basis risk are developed.

This Discussion Paper describes developments affecting Parmalat of Italy, once one of the world's leading dairy-food firms, which filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2003. After the bankruptcy, it was discovered that fraud on a massive scale had occurred at Parmalat, putting the firm in...

This study develops a new and straightforward economic model of basis forecasting that outperforms the simple three-year average method suggested in much of the literature. We use monthly data of the corn basis in the Texas Triangle Area from February 1997 to July 2008. The results and the...

We investigate the objectives of agricultural bank managers and their impacts on bank efficiency. If managers are non-neutral toward risk, then banks may appear inefficient when they are not. We find non-neutrality toward risk and efficiency gains due to firm size, loan shares, asset shares, and...

Options on agricultural futures are popular financial instruments used for agricultural price risk management and to speculate on future price movements. Poor performance of Black’s classical option pricing model has stimulated many researchers to introduce pricing models that are more...

We theoretically examine a farmer’s coverage demand with area and individual insurance plans as either separate or integrated options. The individual and area losses are assumed to be imperfectly and positively correlated. With actuarially fair rates, the farmer will fully insure with the...