Guided by the frame work of a household model under credit market failure, this paper aims at investigating the impact of access to credit on the adoption of hybrid maize among households that vary in their credit constraints. The data used in the study is from Malawi collected by the...

This article tests the efficiency of the hog options market and assesses the impact of the 1996 contract redesign on efficiency. We find that the hog options market is efficient, but some options yielded excess returns during the live hogs period but not during the lean hogs period. Our findings...

This paper is Selected for presentation at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, Georgia, January 31-February 3, 2009. The research is partially funded by ERS/USDA China Project and Social Science Fund of Jiangsu Province in China. The authors are grateful for...

This paper examines the extent to which garment industry in Swaziland has contributed to the economic empowerment of the Swazi people through creation of new jobs and improvement in their overall welfare. In Swaziland as elsewhere in many African countries, unemployment has been and is still a...

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...

We study the difference in the volatility dynamics of CBOT corn, soybeans, and oatsfutures prices across different delivery horizons via the smoothed Bayesian estimatorof Karali, Dorfman, and Thurman (2010). We show that the futures price volatilitiesin these markets are affected by the...

This study examines the systematic risk present in major crops for the United States andthree corn-belt states. An index of commodities is used in conjunction with cash receiptsto generate dynamic estimates of the systematic risk for each crop and state. In our study,we find that beta estimates...

This study examines the dynamic effects of grain prices and energy prices on catfish feed prices and the price of food-sized catfish at the farm level. Using the autoregressive distributed lag model and bounds testing procedure, a long-run relationship between feed and farm prices and their...

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...