dynamic animal economics market equilibrium dynamics of herd inventory management are derived for homogenous female populations short run supply is backward bending in response to permanent changes in demand and is rising in response to transitory changes in demand increasing inventories are associated with high and falling prices and decreasing inventories with low and rising prices but there is no market instability in this these unusual intertemporal substitution effects follow from both rational expectations and appropriately formulated cobweb models and go part of the way toward explaining hog and cattle inventory cycles

econometric developments in agricultural and resource economics the first 100 years this article reviews the major contributions of agricultural and resource economists in the area of econometrics over the past 100 years early on a number of agricultural economists were in on the ground floor in terms of developing new econometric methods over time as the economics profession became more empirically oriented agricultural and resource economists increasingly assumed the role of early adopters of new econometric methods even so agricultural and resource economists continue to make useful modifications to econometric techniques in order to adapt the methods to the unique nature of the problems and applications that we study

cattle cycles heterogeneous expectations and the age distribution of capital abstract this paper builds a dynamic forward looking model describing the approximate 10 year cattle cycle the theoretical model improves on existing models by 1 keeping track of the age distribution of the capital stock 2 allowing for heterogeneous expectations and 3 recognizing that cow calf operators make investment decisions on both the cow and calf margins the structural parameters are estimated with gmm techniques and used to produce impulse response functions which show that the model endogenously propagates shocks to produce 10 year cattle cycles without relying on shocks that hit every 10 years focusing solely on several major macroeconomic shocks i also show that the model is capable of matching the timing and amplitude of the u s cattle cycle

an experimental study of truth telling in a sender receiver game a recent experimental study of cai and wang 2005 on strategic information transmission reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis to evidence that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in terms of a tension between normative social behavior and incentives for lying we show in a simple sender receiver game that subjects incurring in costs to punish liars tell the truth more often than predicted by the logit agent quantal response equilibria whereas subjects that do not punish liars after receiving a deceptive message play on the aggregate equilibrium strategies thus we can partition the subject pool into two groups one group of subjects with preferences for truth telling and one taking into account only material incentives

impacts of declining u s retail beef demand on farm level beef prices and production a systems model was estimated to determine the effects of declining u s retail beef demand on farm level beef prices and production retail beef demand declined by nearly 66 from 1976 to 1999 results indicate autonomous shifts in retail demand significantly impacted farm level demands and production based on equilibrium multipliers the 1976 99 reduction in beef demand decreased real slaughter cattle prices and production by 32 1 and 11 2 respectively real feeder cattle prices and production decreased by 8 0 and 22 6 respectively combining the decreases in farm prices and production slaughter and feeder cattle producers experienced a real revenue reduction of 13 3 billion 61 due to the long term decline in demand

a dynamic model of investment in the u s beef cattle industry reproduction constraints lead to some a priori information that may prove valuable in econo metrically modeling inventory dynamics within the u s cattle herd the distributed lag models estimated for animal inventories suggest an implicit incorporation of the age distribution of the herd that is crucial to understanding the retention culling investment decisions the estimated equations are validated using post sample observations that were withheld prior to estimation the final form dynamic equations have complex roots and protracted price and investment effects the parameter estimates are used to calculate intermediate and long run elasticities at the means of relevant variables

persuasive communication when the sender s incentives are uncertain abstract we study persuasion in a modified crawford sobel sender receiver game in which the receiver makes a binary decision to accept or reject a good recommended by the sender the good s quality and the sender s type neutral or biased are not observable to the receiver these alterations yield a simple model and a unique truth telling equilibrium in which neutral senders who observe different qualities fully separate but can only communicate low quality levels accurately biased senders adopt a mixed strategy that can successfully persuade the receiver to accept the good most of the time when the sender s degree of bias is continuously distributed a truth telling equilibrium does not exist nonetheless a partition equilibrium exists for any given number of partitions on the message space

cattle cycles is there a role for a financial accelerator the hypotheses that endogenous credit constraints based on fluctuating asset values and cash flow prolong and accentuate us cattle cycles and that more diversified cow calf firms are less affected by this phenomenon are tested breeding cattle inventories are an interesting example to study credit constraints because they are among the most cyclical of economic time series firms have heterogeneous diversification levels and they avoid many of the problems with previous investment cash flow sensitivities studies noted by kaplan and zingales the results are consistent with earlier credit constraint studies i e breeding cattle inventories are sensitive to shifting credit constraint regimes and cow calf firms with higher diversification levels are less affected by credit constraints

short run supply responses in the u s beef cattle industry this article investigates the response of beef cattle producers to changes in the price of cattle previous research has suggested that there may be a negative short run supply response to a permanent increase in the price of cattle we build a dynamic rational expectations model that separates the markets for fed and unfed beef this separation generates predictions that the supply response is generally positive even for permanent shocks in the short run and nests the negative supply response as a special case for appropriately restricted demand shocks

does market timing contribute to the cattle cycle recent evidence suggests that cyclical cattle inventories are driven by exogenous shocks this article examines a second possible contributing factor to the cattle cycle a market timing effect that arises from individual attempts to maintain countercyclical inventories the model uncovers an important conceptual point to the extent that cycles are driven by exogenous shocks a representative producer should outperform one who maintains a constant inventory whereas for cycles induced by market timing a representative producer should underperform one with a constant inventory simulated net returns over 1974 98 reveal that a constant inventory manager significantly outperformed the representative u s producer which indicates that market timing influences the cattle cycle

estimating intertemporal supply response in the fed beef market a partial adjustment model with monthly lag structures on expected output and input prices is used to estimate intertemporal supply behavior of fed beef previous research has provided conflicting supply elasticities the present work reconciles the conflicts by integrating different lengths of run into cattle marketing and placement decisions for example the model dynamics incorporate short run changes in cattle asset values and long run adjustments in resource use empirical results provide no evidence of short run supply fixity supply elasticities switch from negative to positive over time

strong and weak links many of the interesting issues in the economics of networks information transmission individual incentives with local externalities investments in connections and the structure of complex networks have to do with the quality of links between individuals entities however most of the research to date has assumed a one zero formulation of connections i argue that it is possible to write down tractable models of quality of links and that analyzing such models yields fresh insights into these issues jel c72 d85 z13

homogeneity and supply supply functions in the ubiquitous gorman class are examined for their homogeneity properties homogeneity places surprisingly strong restrictions on functional forms these forms facilitate testing of aggregability given homogeneity or homogeneity given aggregability or testing both

estimating intertemporal supply response in the fed beef market comment in a recent article in this journal marsh estimated a monthly supply equation for beef slaughter fed marketings that was intended to resolve past discrepancies of the signs of own price elasticities he concluded that the discrepancy could be explained by introducing dynamics that allowed different signs for short run and long run elasticities marsh also estimated a dynamic demand equation for the feeder cattle input his study is recent well executed and representative of much agricultural supply response work it may not be a key model in the sense used by tomek and therefore a candidate for duplication though the study does engage in the spirit of tomek s improvement criterion marsh specifies a model that satisfies the traditional measures of model performance that is it exhibits a good durbinwatson statistic a good r2 and significant t statistics it accounts for the presence of lagged dependent variables and autocorrelated disturbances by implementing a nonlinear least squares algorithm burt townsend and lafrance that allows for consistent and asymptotically efficient estimates however we find his model turns out flawed when confronted with other statistical and economic

an econometric model of cattle inventories dynamic regression equations are estimated for each beef cattle breeding herd and beef cattle inventories at two levels of aggregation the u s and montana the analysis for montana was utilized as a guide for specification of the national equation to reduce the inference problem associated with letting the sample data help specify the model rational lags on average price received by farmers for calves and the ratio of fed beef to corn prices at omaha constitute the primary explanatory variables the equations perform exceedingly well over the sample period 1950 80 and in post sample forecasts with the sample truncated back to 1970

information transmission when the sender s preferences are uncertain abstract in deciding on the magnitude of a certain action say investment a decision maker relies on the report of an informed and interested expert who can suppress favorable information the main departure from the related literature is that the decision maker is uncertain as to whether the expert is of a type that wants to minimize the magnitude of the action or to maximize it the unique equilibrium outcome is fully characterized by a threshold level of favorable information if the information is more favorable than that threshold level and if the expert is of the type that wants to maximize the magnitude of the action the information is fully revealed in all other cases the expert report less favorable information and the equilibrium inference is that in expectation the actual information is just as favorable as the threshold level

on information and market dynamics the case of the u s beef market abstract the paper investigates the nature of dynamic prices and expectations in a competitive market the approach is applied to the u s beef market which exhibits cyclical patterns and significant biological lags in the production process beef price equations are estimated under different expectation regimes the empirical results indicate the presence of heterogeneous price expectations with a significant number of market participants neglecting information about the existence of a beef cycle

international comparisons of cattle cycles the time series properties of cattle production in three countries with different technologies argentina the united states and uruguay are studied in order to shed light on the role of technology in the dynamics of the cattle sector four series are analyzed for each country slaughter price stock of cows and total herd spectral decomposition of the time series shows the existence of cycles having surprising regularity for all the four time series the three countries exhibit very similar cyclicities in spite of their different technologies and economic environment

credit constraints farm characteristics and the farm economy differential impacts on feeder cattle and beef cow inventories a recurrent topic in the macroeconomic literature is the financial accelerator the notion that informational asymmetries introduce inefficiencies to financial markets which amplify and propagate the effects of real or monetary shocks with the purpose of finding empirical evidence that is consistent with a financial accelerator operating in the cattle sector inventory investment models are estimated with an appended cash flow variable the inclusion of cash flow is motivated by the notion that investment by credit constrained farms should be sensitive to movements in internal funds results are consistent with the financial accelerator operating in the feeder cattle but not in the cow calf sector

strategic communication with lying costs i study a model of strategic communication between an uninformed receiver and an informed but upwardly biased sender the sender bears a cost of lying or more broadly of misrepresenting his private information the main results show that inflated language naturally arises in this environment where the sender almost always claims to be of a higher type than he would with complete information regardless of the intensity of lying cost there is incomplete separation with some pooling on the highest messages the degree of language inflation and how much information is revealed depend upon the intensity of lying cost the analysis delivers a framework to span a class of cheap talk and verifiable disclosure games unifying the polar predictions they make under large conflicts of interest i use the model to discuss how the degree of manipulability of information can affect the trade off between delegation and communication copyright 2009 wiley blackwell

using privileged information to manipulate markets insiders gurus and credibility access to private information is shown to generate both the incentives and the ability to manipulate asset markets through strategically distorted announcements the fact that privileged information is noisy interferes with the public s attempts to learn whether such announcements are honest it allows opportunistic individuals to manipulate prices repeatedly without ever being fully found out this leads us to extend sobel s 1985 model of strategic communication to the case of noisy private signals our results show that when truthfulness is not easily verifiable restrictions on trading by insiders may be needed to preserve the integrity of information embodied in prices