Author: Shu MengPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Three Essays on Agricultural Commodity Market Linkages
Author: Shu MengThree Essays on Agricultural Commodity Market Linkages
Author: Jieyuan ZhaoThree Essays on Market Microstructure and Price Formation in Agricultural Commodity Futures
Author: Steffen VolkenandThree Essays on the Growth of Agroindustry and Changing Commodity Markets
Author: Karen E. ThomePublisher:
ISBN: 9781267969873
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
My dissertation focuses on the structure of three different agricultural markets that have been at the forefront of changes in industry structure in the last two decades. As agroindustry expands in the developing world, there is a focus on high-value agricultural exports and demand from a growing middle class; my first essay is a model of contracting for such a commodity when quality is important. Market liberalization has led to changes in the structure of agricultural markets; essay 2 tests for market power in the newly privatized corn flour industry in Mexico. Finally, the search for agricultural value added has led to investment in corn ethanol plants in the United States; essay 3 models strategic interactions among these plants. Essay 1 is a model of an agricultural contract where quality is measurable, but measurement of quality is not always enforced. First I show that the buyer with market power can benefit from restricting the number of contracts he signs because the contract price is dependent on the expected spot market price. Under some circumstances it may be optimal for a buyer of the agricultural product to reject high-quality product that he has contracted. In this model rational producers are not harmed by the rejection itself, because they are compensated for the potential rejection in the contract price. Policy interventions that focus on inhibiting the ability of the buyer to influence the spot market price could improve producer well being. In essay 2, I estimate market power in the corn flour market in Mexico. After ratifying NAFTA, Mexico had to move from state-trader intervention along the corn-corn flour-tortilla supply chain to a free-market model. Post-liberalization, Mexican tortilla and corn flour prices increased, while corn prices remained flat. Because the corn flour market is highly concentrated, I ask whether this divergence in price is due to flour producers' ability to exercise market power. Using a NEIO oligopoly model, I find no evidence of market power in the corn flour sector. Essay 3 focuses on the growth of ethanol production in the United States. A favorable policy environment and high oil prices, among other factors, led to enormous investment in the United States ethanol industry beginning in the late 1990s. In this essay I ask what factors contributed to the timing and location of these investments, specifically focusing on strategic interactions among plants. I use both reduced-form and structural models of investment, and find a net-negative effect of incumbent plants on investment.
Three Essays In Commodity Price Dynamics
Author: Amal DabbousPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121
Book Description
This thesis consists of three essays in commodity price dynamics. In the first essay, we embed a staggered price feature into the speculative storage model of Deaton and Laroque (1996). Intermediate goods inventory speculators are added as an additional source of intertemporal linkage which helps us to replicate the stylized facts of the observed commodity price dynamics. The staggered pricing mechanism adopted in this paper can be viewed as a parsimonious way of approximating various types of frictions that increase the degree of persistence in the first two conditional moments of commodity prices. The structural parameters of our model are estimated by simulated method of moments using actual prices for four agricultural commodities. Simulated data are then employed to assess the effects of our staggered price approach on the time series properties of commodity prices. Our results lend empirical support to the possibility of staggered prices. The second essay investigates the determinants of the percentage change in commodity prices. We apply the dynamic Gordon growth model technique and conduct the variance decomposition for the percentage change in spot commodity prices to 6 agricultural commodities. The model explains the percentage change in spot commodity prices in terms of the expected present discounted values of interest rate, yield spread, open interest and convenience yield. Empirical results indicate that the model is successful in capturing a large proportion of the variability in the 6 agricultural commodity prices. Moreover, we show that yield spread and open interest help predicting changes in commodity prices. Finally, the third essay evaluates different hedging strategies for eleven commodities. In addition to the traditional regression hedge ratio model (OLS) and the vector error correction model (VECM), we estimate dynamic hedge ratios using the conventional dynamic conditional correlation model (DCC) of Engle (2002) and the diagonal BEKK model (DBEKK) of Engle and Kroner (1995). Moreover, we propose two more advanced models, the DCC model and the DBEKK model that will account for the impact of the growth rate of open interest on market’s volatility and co-movements of commodity spot and futures returns. The empirical analysis shows that adding the growth rate of open interest improves the in-sample hedging effectiveness of the DCC model. Furthermore, the out-of-sample hedging exercise empirical results show that static models present the best out-of-sample hedging performance for 5 of the commodities. The DCC model presents the smallest basis variance for 4 of the commodities. The DBEKK model with the growth rate of open interest performs the best in terms of the basis variance reduction for corn and wheat. Our out-of-sample empirical findings provide important implications for futures hedging and highlight the fact that the use of static models to determine the optimal hedge ratio could be more effective than the use of dynamic hedge ratio models.
Three Essays on Market Efficiency
Author: Thanasin TanompongphandhPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
This dissertation tackles the concept of market efficiency from three distinct topics in applied economics, from microfinance, to agriculture commodity market, and further to market microstructure of the most advanced economy. The first essay, entitled "Market Efficiency and Price Discovery Among Leading Rice Exporting Countries", focuses on the issue of rice market efficiency. The study establishes, under Johansen's procedure, that there are long-run price co-movements existing among the three major rice-exporting countries, and within the United States domestic markets, the long-run efficient linkage between spot and future prices of rough rice, as Chicago Board of Trade rough rice futures converge to United States Department of Agriculture rough rice prices in a cash market. Regarding the efficiency among the export market prices, results show that the hypothesis of market efficiency are rejected in two of the three pairs, namely Thai-Vietnam and ThaiUS(Arkansas). The Gonzalo & Granger (1995) decomposition method finds that the Thai and United States rice are dominant in the price discovery process. Within the United States domestic markets, the dominant is the futures market followed by the cash market of the rough rice and then the milled rice export price. The second essay, entitled "Determinants for Formal Credit and Informal Credit Access: The Case of Thai Farm Households", examines determinants for Thai agricultural households' participation in formal and its informal parallel credit markets. The study follows Heckman's two-stage selection model (1979) approach to determine the informal loan participation of Thai agricultural households. Results reveal that households tend to 'stick' to the credit market in which they were previously engaged. This finding reinforces the vicious cycle which makes it more difficult for farmers to get out of debt. Secondly, the study finds that wealthier households are less likely to access credit, and are more likely to participate in formal credits than their less wealthy peers. Results also show less probability of credit access between May and December coinciding with the planting and harvesting season accentuating the nature of loans as working-capital rather than consumption loans. Finally, the study discovers that households with owned farmland are more likely to participate in the formal credit market, while households with rented farmland are more likely to participate in the informal credit market stressing the use of owned land as collateral to participate in the former. The final essay, entitled "On the Challenge of Testing Weak-Form Market Efficiency using High Frequency Data", explores the issue of efficiency in microstructure of the Exchange-Traded-Fund (ETF). This essay shows that the profitability of a simple technical trading strategy hinges heavily on the way the Trades And Quotes (TAQ) dataset is filtered for mistakes and outliers. This paper uses ultra-high-frequency TAQ data that cover the time-span since the inception of the S & P 500 ETF from January 1993 to December 2006. First, a widely used filtering methodology proposed by Hasbrouck (2003) is adopted. Under this methodology, the technical trading strategy clearly outperforms the buy-and-hold benchmark. However, when a more appropriate (stringent) filtering methodology is used, the technical trading strategy clearly underperforms the buy-and-hold benchmark. This evidence suggests that studies that based their methodology on Hasbrouck's (2003) less stringent filtering criterion could produce misleading results.
Three Essays on the Impact of International Trade Policy on Agricultural Input Markets
Author: Lei LeiPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Book Description
This dissertation provides a thorough analysis of the impact of international trade policy on agricultural input markets. International agricultural trade are often affected by policies in importing and exporting countries. These policies can be directly or indirectly imposed on the production inputs. It is important to understand the markets’ responses in both importing and exporting countries to the policies changes through vertical linkages between the input and output markets. This dissertation provides three essays to study this topic from the prospective of importer, exporter, input market, output market, and trade negotiation mechanism. Essay 1 studies a European Union trade policy induced technological innovation, specifically on its impact on the U.S. apple markets. I adopt the Ex Ante approach to simulate the market reaction to both the European Union policy change and the technological innovation. The research finds that the policy induced technological innovation benefits the outputs that are intensive in the policy affected input. The methodology and conclusion contribute to research on markets with highly differentiated products. Essay 2 is motivated by the decade-long cotton dispute between Brazil and the United States. The dispute was arbitrated based on several domestic policies of the United States. This chapter analyzes the impact of a U.S. domestic policy on 1) land re-allocation with a difference-in difference model; 2) international cotton trade between the United States and the rest of world including Brazil with a partial equilibrium simulation model. Based on the analysis, I find limited policy impact of removing this particularly U.S. domestic policy on international cotton trade. The result is consistent to the World Trade Organization arbitration of the dispute. Essay 3 summarizes three most common methods of quantifying the trade impact of non-tariff trade measures in the literature. I carefully compare the advantages and disadvantages between each method. A guidance of how to choose an appropriate method based on the characteristic of a non-tariff trade measure is summarized. To illustrate the guidance, I show a real example of apple trade with non-tariff trade measure imposed by the European Union.
Three Essays on Commodity Markets
Author: Panayotis Nicholas VarangisPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
Three Essays on Commodity Markets and Health Economics
Author: Sihong ChenThree Essays in International Trade in the Agricultural Sector
Author: Wendkouni Jean-Baptiste ZongoPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 105
Book Description
In standard trade models with constant average cost, the firm's sales in any given market is related to other markets only through price indices which are treated as exogenous in the firm's optimization. With cost convexity, the firm's decision in any given market is directly tied to sales in other markets through an index aggregating the trade cost-adjusted market size of the destinations supplied by the firm. The difference made by increasing costs is that the firm is cognizant that by changing its sales in a given destination it changes its unit cost for all destinations. This in turn triggers extensive and intensive margins adjustments. In the first essay, we develop a theoretical framework to address the incidence of increasing marginal costs and capacity constraints on trade at the extensive and the intensive margins and on export duration. Under convex costs, an increase in productivity may not increase the number of destinations supplied by a firm, making "ins and outs", not just new entries. We generated empirical evidence in support of the aforementioned trade adjustments by assessing the incidence of lagged foregone exports on exports to "fallback markets" and on export survival. Exports to the fallback markets systematically increase in response to foregone sales from terminated trade flows. Similarly, the sum of foregone sales from terminated trade flows make existing trade flows more resilient, less prone to an export failure. A distinguishing feature of our survival models is that they test and correct for the endogeneity of tariffs. Previous studies reported peculiar results about the incidence of tariff on export survival. We too find wrong signs when tariff is treated as an exogenous variable, but we find that higher tariffs increase the likelihood of export failures when tariff endogeneity is addressed. The second essay investigates the dynamic impacts of animal disease outbreak on cattle and beef trade accounting for vertical linkage between cattle and beef. The empirical framework features a multi-sample selection model (MSSM) to investigate how animal-specific diseases affect aggregate trade flows at the extensive and intensive margins of trade in livestock and meat products over time, accounting for constraints imposed by the technological linkages between livestock and meat productions. The spontaneous emergence of foot and mouth disease adversely impacts the extensive and intensive margins of trade in cattle and beef for seven years. Our results show that the extensive margin effects of the disease outbreak are larger than its corresponding intensive margin effects. Regarding cross-species effects, the avian flu and swine fever reduce the probability and the level of trade in cattle and beef. The third essay studies a counterfactual experiment about the elimination of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and the foot and mouth diseases (FMD) on beef trade flows. Disease outbreak alerts typically prompt importing countries to impose trade bans. The bans vary a lot across importing countries in terms of product coverage and duration. We rely on a unique balanced panel dataset that covers 4-digit disaggregated beef product over the 1996-2013 period. Previous gravity studies reported only partial trade flow effects. However, a large shock like the complete elimination of BSE and FMD diseases must affect the inward and outward multilateral resistance indices (i.e., the importing countries' barriers on beef imports from all sources and the trade barriers faced by exporting countries in all destinations), factory-gate prices, consumer expenditures and the value of beef production in exporting countries. Our results confirm that the indirect channels through which BSE and FMD impact trade are important when it comes to measuring welfare gains. Interestingly, our counterfactual experiment suggests that Canada would be one of the countries gaining the most from BSE and FMD eradication.