U.S. live cattle markets have experienced dramatic shifts in marketing methods over the past two decades, changing the way live cattle prices are discovered. We identify relationships between prices of the five major live cattle marketing regions using Granger causality and directed graph analysis. The two approaches complement each other and reveal that interweek and intraweek price discovery roles for given markets differ. Evidence indicates that Colorado, though a minor market in terms of relative volume, has become an important source of interweek price information to other markets.

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of situation and outlook information from World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) in corn and soybean futures markets over the period 1985 to 2006. Results indicate that WASDE reports containing National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) crop production estimates and other domestic and international situation and outlook information have the largest impact; causing return variance on report sessions to be 7.38 times greater than normal return variance in corn futures and 6.87 times greater than normal return variance in soybean futures. WASDE reports limited to international situation information and domestic and international outlook information have a smaller impact. The results show that the impact of WASDE reports has increased over time.

This paper examines the supply response of the Greek pork market. A GARCH process is used to estimate expected price and price volatility, while price and supply equations are estimated jointly. In addition to the standard GARCH model, several different symmetric, asymmetric, and nonlinear GARCH models are estimated. The empirical results indicate that among the estimated GARCH models, the quadratic NAGARCH model seems to better describe producers' price volatility, which was found to be an important risk factor of the supply response function of the Greek pork market. Furthermore, the empirical findings show that feed price is an important cost factor of the supply response function and that high uncertainty restricts the expansion of the Greek pork sector. Finally, the model provides forecasts for quantity supplied, producers' price, and price volatility.

A latent segmentation modeling is used in this study to identify theheterogeneity of willingness-to-pay estimates for quality attributes andcountry-of-origin in the Korean beef market. Three distinctive groups ofgrocery shoppers are identified based on their level of concern (very,moderately, and not too concerned) about the use of antibiotics andgenetically modified organism feed ingredients in beef production. Resultsindicate that the very concerned group values such attributes asantibiotics-free, genetically modified organism-free, and domesticproduction the most among the three groups. Results also suggest that themost important factor in determining grocery shoppers' willingness-to-pay iscountry-of-origin for all three groups.