Recent studies indicate that the effect of government subsidies on rental rates for farmland may be lower than once thought and lower than predictions from theory. However, there are still a number of unresolved issues in estimating subsidy incidence econometrically. We identify three such...

Analysis of the cotton futures price spike and its effects on commercial hedgers suggest that we do not completely understand the behavior of markets and firms in periods of extreme volatility. After presenting the story of the cotton futures price spike, this paper argues that explanations...

This paper studies the effect of electronic trade on the quality of market price discovery, using the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) cotton futures market as a laboratory to measure market quality under periods of floor trade, parallel floor and electronic trade, and electronic-only trade....

This paper studies the effect of electronic trade on the quality of market price discovery, using the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) cotton futures market as a laboratory to measure market quality under periods of floor trade, parallel floor and electronic trade, and electronic-only trade....

Are futures prices exogenous to agricultural supply? It depends. We argue that crop yield shocks were predictable during the 1961-2007 period because high planting-time futures prices tended to indicate that yield would be below trend. This feature of the data implies that regressions of...

Recent econometric studies indicate that the effect of government farm subsidies on farmland rental rates may be smaller than once thought. This literature has corrected for bias due to expectation error in measured subsidy payments. We suggest two additional sources of bias—inertia and...