Thoughts on economics
There are 20 posts filed in Economics (this is page 1 of 2).
This week's commodity export reports were released this morning and it was another abysmal week for sales and inspections. We are headed into the biggest weeks of the marketing year for shipments doing about half what we usually do. But we all knew that was happening. I thought it would be interesting to look…
Photo by Ronan on Unsplash All eyes are on export sales and shipments of soybeans in the midst of the 2018 trade war. I always have my commodity price analysis students produce those ‘export pace of use’ charts as a lab assignment because it is data that is very actively followed in the commodity marketing…
If the title caught your attention, read on to find out how funding and money works in graduate school. Photo by Good Free Photos on Unsplash Graduate versus Professional Degree The biggest distinction in economics is between ‘traditional’ graduate degrees (which typically pay you) and ‘professional’ graduate degrees (which typically you pay for). The Professional…
Image from http://www.cgpgrey.com [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons Tamar Haspel has an article in yesterday’s Washington Post titled, “Why do taxpayers subsidize rich farmers?” The article is a take on the USDA’s recent report “The Evolving Distribution of Payments From Commodity, Conservation, and Federal Crop Insurance Programs”“, by McFadden and Hoppe that looks at…
Publishing in an academic journal is a long and grueling process. But much of the length of time is spent simply waiting for reviewers - who are volunteer and unpaid - to do the hard work of determining contribution and quality of the submitted manuscript. **Edited: Thanks to @FarmerHayek and @AparnaHowlader for pointing me to…
This is the third in a series of posts where I document my own process in figuring out how machine learning relates to the classic econometrics one learns in a graduate program in economics. Note that I am a humble practitioner of applied econometrics, so the ideas I am working through are not new,…
New paper published in Agricultural Economics, "The components of the bid-ask spread: evidence from the corn futures market." Co-authored with Quanbiao Shang and Phil Garcia. The paper was from Quanbiao's master's thesis. H*ck of a thesis! I do a full post summarizing our findings soon.
This is the second in a series of posts where I document my own process in figuring out how machine learning relates to the classic econometrics one learns in a graduate program in economics. Note that I am a humble practitioner of applied econometrics, so the ideas I am working through are not new,…
Photo by Dirk Vorderstraße (Mähdrescher von John Deere in der Warburger Börde) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons Machine learning and artificial intelligence are the biggest topics in tech right now, and the excitement is spilling over to economics. The 2018 ASSA meetings (I did not attend, just browsed the program) had at least five…
This post is the sixth and final in a series explaining Basic Time Series Analysis. Click the link to check out the first post which focused on stationarity versus non-stationarity, and to find a list of other topics covered. As a reminder, this post is intended to be a very applied example of how…
