The goal of this paper is to systematically review the literature on United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecast evaluation and critically assess their methods and findings. The fundamental characteristics of optimal forecasts are bias, accuracy and efficiency as well as encompassing and informativeness. This review revealed that the findings of these studies can be very different based on the forecasts examined, commodity, sample period, and methodology. Some forecasts performed very well, while others were not very reliable, resulting in forecast specific optimality record. We discuss methodological and empirical contributions of these studies as well as their shortcomings and potential opportunities for future work.

The beef industry is facing increasing pressure to adopt sustainable practices, driven by environmental, economic, and social concerns. Designing effective policies that satisfy industry demands while aligning with public interests is a complex challenge. Using a nationally representative survey of 3,001 U.S. residents, we employ a best–worst scaling approach to assess preferences for nine beef sustainability policies. Results reveal consumers prioritize affordability of beef products and welfare of cattle as most important sustainability policies. Conversely, policies addressing greenhouse gas emissions from cattle production are least important, with less than 6% of respondents preferring them.

This study explores the economics of culling decisions in cow-calf operations in the Southern U.S. with a novel application of a dynamic mathematical programing model. The results provide an optimal culling strategy under the base model and a range of optimal strategies that vary with respect to different components such as fertility probabilities, prices, replacement costs, and pregnancy checking. The results suggest that producers should cull all cows that are older than age 10 and cows that fail to calve once they reach the age of 7. The sensitivity analysis underlines the impact of market conditions, replacement costs, and pregnancy check use on the optimal culling decisions.

Consumers often struggle to make their choice in the highly diversified wine market. With wine being an experience good, consumers must rely on extrinsic characteristics, e.g., information on the label. Thus, easily available quality signals like consumer ratings have become an increasingly useful and widespread tool. Vivino is one of the largest online wine communities with over 60 million users, which have more than doubled since 2018. Hence, users have easy access to peer ratings, while established wine expert ratings are being challenged. This study analyzes data from Vivino to explore factors affecting consumer ratings at different price points, considering several wine attributes like geographical indications, brand, and the so-called “community effect.” We show that there is a small but significant community effect on wine's perceived quality related to its popularity among users of the Vivino community, as well as effects from specific wine attributes. Moreover, we estimate a hedonic quantile model on similar price ranges to compare the effect of the same regressors on wine prices. Results contribute to a better understanding of how different factors affect consumers’ wine evaluations, allowing to compare their effect on the “pure” consumer preference (i.e., consumer ratings) and market value.

Causal flow analyses combined with time series analyses are used to examine price relationships among fresh broiler retail markets (Northeast, South, Midwest, and West). Results indicate structural changes have occurred in this industry. Reasons for changes in price relationships include the perishable nature of fresh broilers, along with vertical integration and increases in production and concentration in the industry. The four markets are integrated, but the level of integration has decreased over time. With the markets becoming more exogenous, there may be a decrease in society’s welfare. The South market is the most important market for price discovery.

We develop a theoretical framework and present a corresponding empirical analysis of the Food and Drug Administration’s irrigation water quality regulatory standard under the Food Safety Modernization Act using lettuce as a case study. We develop a stochastic price endogenous partial equilibrium model with recourse to examine the standard’s efficacy under various scenarios of foodborne illness severity, standard implementation, demand response to foodborne outbreaks, and irrigation costs. The stringency of regulation is evaluated with endogenous producer response to regulatory requirements and corresponding implications for economic surplus. The baseline results show that in the case of the lettuce market, the proposed microbial irrigation water quality regulation in the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) is not cost effective relative to the existing Leafy-Greens Marketing Agreements relying on water treatment for mitigation of microbial contamination. However, FSMA can be cost effective if water treatment is sufficiently expensive.

We use a dynamic model of the U.S. apple industry separated into organic and conventional production to better measure the impacts of pest or disease outbreaks on producers and consumers, along with an equilibrium displacement model to simulate welfare effects from various shocks compared to a baseline. Our results show that the impacts of the outbreaks differ between organic and conventional production methods. Growers’ and consumers’ responses to shocks differ widely across the industry. Farmers and policy makers should use these findings to appropriately respond to different shocks and production methods.

This study investigates the effects of genetic improvement policies on dairy production, with a particular emphasis on Artificial Insemination projects. Furthermore, we evaluate the major barriers and challenges of Artificial Insemination projects including water scarcity. Using the data-driven synthetic control method, we found evidence that the Artificial Insemination projects caused milk production to increase by 59 thousand tons on average from 2008 to 2018. This could be correlated with food security (i.e., synergies), but increased dairy production may also place strain on Senegal’s water resources (i.e. trade-offs). To achieve a more efficient outcome, Senegalese dairy policies should consider the negative externalities of these projects on water resources.

This paper proposes an approach to determine efficient release prices on the Bordeaux en primeur (primary) market. The model exploits information from the secondary market to estimate efficient release prices. We apply the model to a representative sample of wines from the 2021 vintage. The results show that most chateaux released their wines at prices that were too high. The median overpricing is 5.2% but exceeds 30% for some wines. This situation may be partially attributed to excessively uniform pricing caused by the tendency of chateaux with similar status to release their wines at similar price levels.

This study builds upon the existing literature on the Working curve and backwardation to explore the impact of storage regimes on the volatility measures of substitute agricultural commodity markets. We investigate the impact of commodity fundamentals (storage regime and stocks-to-use ratio), commodity-specific financial variables (options hedging pressure-long and -short), world economic activity, market-wide volatility index, seasonality, and time-to-maturity on nearby and deferred implied volatility (IV) series of selected commodity pairs of corn-soybean and winter wheat-spring wheat. Our work confirms that, in some cases, grain and oilseed IV derived from options premia respond to shocks in commodity (and substitute commodity) fundamentals which are in line with the behaviour of volatility in futures markets. Own-storage regime effects on price variability are stronger in the selected markets, while spillover effects from substitute commodity storage regimes show a modest impact on volatilities. We also find some evidence for the stocks-to-use ratio of both corn and soybean to impact both their own and each other’s IV, while options hedging pressure has some impact only on wheat IVs.

As the market for fine-wine investing matures, basic questions of portfolio strategy remain unexplored. I evaluate how adding fine wine from the superstar châteaux of Bordeaux's Right Bank might complement the traditional focus on the five first-growths of Bordeaux's Left Bank. Fundamentals for the Right Bank's superstars are attractive: they produce roughly an order of magnitude less, face different production conditions, and receive equally impressive critical reviews. However, they receive far less attention than their Left Bank counterparts. To examine returns over the long run, I hand-collected 10,885 prices for eight wines from an archive of 391 Sherry-Lehmann catalogs, a New York City retailer, which began at the end of Prohibition. Using these historical price records, I compare the real returns from investing in the five Premier Cru to a portfolio that adds three superstar châteaux from the Right Bank: Ausone, Cheval Blanc, and Petrus. I find the geometric-average annual return was 6.78% in real terms from 1938 to 2017 for the joint portfolio, less than 0.01% different, but with better risk-reward as measured by the Sharpe ratio. Additionally, I find the life cycle of aging is substantially different across the two Banks, which could provide further diversification benefits for the strategic investor.

This paper investigates the relative importance of various attributes, including varietal, brands, and geographic origin, in explaining retail wine prices for the United States market. We use a metric based on the Shapely value, from cooperative game theory, in the context of an empirical hedonic price equation estimated using a large sample of retail wine sales for home consumption over the period 2007–2019. We find that brands alone explain more than 70% of the variation in wine prices, but geographic origin and varietals retain additional explanatory power. Furthermore, information about the geographic origin appears to be a considerably more important attribute than varietals.

Wine investment returns can come from overall market trends or price increases with age. Because of the short wine price histories available, market and maturation effects are difficult to separate. Consequently, researchers often obtain dramatically different estimates of investment returns. We find that data sample bias may be the hidden cause of the disparate estimates. In wine auction data, the sample bias refers to a shift in the distribution of which wines are traded as a function of their age. Such sample bias in panel data sampled across many different wine labels can distort the estimation of price increases versus age and consequently impact the estimation of market trends. This analysis shows that segmenting the analysis such that the data panels contain wine labels with similar trading characteristics can lead to a more stable estimation.

The analysis here looks at data from Bordeaux, Italy, Australia, and California. An Age-Period-Cohort (APC) analysis is applied to data panels from each region. Then the data in each region is segmented by a measure of popularity in order to reduce sampling bias. Data thus segmented is then re-analyzed to demonstrate the difference in estimating price appreciation lifecycles and market trends.

We use data from Wine Spectator on 266,301 bottles from 12 countries sold in the United States to investigate the link between the score awarded by the guide and the price charged. The link between quality and price is positive, in line with the literature. In a deeper inspection, however, hedonic regressions show that the price premium attached to higher quality is significant only for “superstar” wines with more than 90 points (on a 50–100 scale), while prices of wines between 50 and 90 points are not statistically different from each other. Furthermore, an analysis performed through normal heteroskedastic and quantile regression models shows that the dispersion of quality-adjusted prices is described by an asymmetric U-shaped function of the score; that is, products with the lowest and highest quality have the highest residual standard deviation. Pursuing excellence is a risky strategy; the average price is significantly higher only for wines that achieve top scores, and the price premium becomes more volatile.

Many cattle producers and producer organizations are concerned that the live cattle negotiated market has become too thin. The percentage of live cattle procured through direct negotiations has declined below 20%, while the percentage procured through formulas has increased to more than 60%. Most formulas are based on directly negotiated cattle prices. Proposed legislation mandating that a larger percentage of live cattle be procured through negotiations represents a market intervention. We show that live cattle futures prices are good proxies for negotiated cash prices, while being less restrictive for meeting proposed cash cattle procurement percentage requirements.

This study investigates the determinants of coffee prices received by growers in Costa Rica, paying attention to the impact of environmental, regional, quality, and international aspects in a panel data set for the period 2008–2016. We identify three groups of variables that affect domestic coffee prices. Some of them are external to the control of the coffee growers, such as the international price of green coffee or the power of multinationals; others, such as the altitude where the coffee is harvested or the berries' yield, are related to coffee quality but difficult to modify by coffee growers. The focus of our study is on the third group, which refers to differentiation strategies related to environmental certifications. More specifically, we consider two particularly relevant certifications, which are Fairtrade mills and organic coffee. We find that organic coffee berries received higher prices, but Fairtrade mills report lower average prices than other, non-certified, buyers.

The study applies parametric and nonparametric estimation methods to determine hedonic prices of rice quality attributes, and a partial equilibrium model to determine the payoff to investing in quality improvement in five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Results indicate that consumers are willing to pay price premiums for head rice, slender grains, peak viscosity, parboiled rice, and rice sold in urban markets. However, they strongly discount amylose content, rice with impurities and imported rice. Investing in quality improvement through amylose content reduction leads to net welfare gains with a benefit-cost ratio of 47.86 and internal rate of return of 90%.

In October 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) released a report classifying processed meat as a type 1 carcinogen. The report prompted headlines and attracted immediate public attention, but the economic impacts remain unknown. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the IARC report on selected processed meat prices and purchases using retail scanner data from US grocery stores. We compare changes in prices and sales of selected processed meat products to a constructed synthetic control group (using a convex combination of nonmeat food products). We find a significant decrease in bacon prices in the wake of the IARC report release, but we find no evidence of a sales reduction. We find no significant changes in price and sales for ham and sausage. The pattern of price and quantity changes are consistent with downward shifts in demand and outward shifts in supply for bacon and sausage following the release of the IARC report.

The dairy industries in California, Idaho, and New Mexico expanded rapidly during the early 2000s. This study focuses on the expansion effects on milk-to-hay price responsiveness. Dairy industry expansion makes hay markets tighter, with less available marketable supply in most periods. The empirical models account for the expansion effect as well as those from hay exports and low stocks-to-use ratios that also cause changes in hay market demand characteristics. The results show that hay-to-milk price responsiveness increased after dairy expansion in all analyzed states. Low stocks-to-use and high exports dampened the responsiveness, but were not statistically significant for all analyzed states.

Bilateral trade agreements between Japan and major wine-exporting countries have resulted in tariff eliminations in Japan. This raises questions about how tariffs affect the competitiveness of wine-exporting countries. The generalized dynamic Rotterdam model was used in estimating Japanese wine demand by source. Estimates were then used to project the impact of tariffs on imports of Australian, Chilean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and U.S. wine. Tariff reductions primarily benefit affected countries, with limited adverse effects on competing countries. The elimination of tariffs on U.S. wine should offset any losses from competing trade agreements.