INTRODUCTION Prices are a standard and important component of market and food security analysis because they serve as an indicator of both food availability and food access. Prices are a measure of availability because they tend to rise as the supply of food falls in relation to demand (e.g., poor production, constrained imports of food), and they tend to fall when supply expands in relation to...

The ethanol blend wall and high RIN prices has become a controversial policy issue. We develop a model showing how RIN prices reflect the costs of overcoming the blend wall, namely biodiesel consumed in excess of its mandate and expansion of E85 sales. These costs are very high and are shown to be borne by producers and consumers of ethanol and gasoline. Although RIN prices reduce consumer pric...

This technical report illustrates the methodology adopted for the estimation of a monthly indicator of the euro area real gross domestic product. We carry out the disaggregation of the chain-linked quarterly value added from the output side for six branches of the NACE Rev. 1 Level A6 classification and from the expenditure side for the main GDP components. With the sole exception of the agricu...

The goal of this paper is to test whether changes in the marketing margin between the farm and the retail prices can result in an asymmetric relationship between the farm and the retail prices in the rice market of Taiwan. By separating the transaction cost variation into two regimes, this paper utilizes a two-regime TVECM with the error correction term serving as the threshold variable to crea...

Background: Many states and localities throughout the U.S. have adopted higher minimum wages. Higher labor costs among low-wage food system workers could result in higher food prices. Methods: Using a market basket of 106 foods, food prices were collected at affected chain supermarket stores in Seattle and same-chain unaffected stores in King County (n = 12 total, six per location). Prices were...

We investigate the valuation of catastrophe insurance derivatives that are traded at the Chicago Board of Trade. By modeling the underlying index as a compound Poisson process we give a representation of no-arbitrage price processes using Fourier analysis. This characterization enables us to derive the inverse Fourier transform of prices in closed form for every fixed equivalent martingale meas...

We develop a dynamic model of experience goods pricing with independent private valuations. We show that the optimal paths of sales and prices can be described in terms of a simple dichotomy. In a mass market, prices are declining over time. In a niche market, the optimal prices are initially low followed by higher prices that extract surplus from the buyers with a high willingness to pay. We c...

When using market prices to t the parameters of models for the price of bonds, the rst step is to strip the market bonds of their coupons. The standard bootstrapping technique of stripping coupons can cause mispricing if there are no bonds that mature for some periods or if there are several bonds that mature at the same time. The authors suggest a new linear programming formulation to strip ou...

The study investigates consumers’ preference for cowpea reflected in the Nigerian markets through price discounts and premiums that consumers pay for different cowpea characteristics. The price data used for this study were obtained through a market survey. A common data collection protocol was employed. Every month, between October 2009 to December 2010, five cowpea samples per seller were bou...