There are 15 posts filed in Uncategorized (this is page 1 of 2).
The USDA ERS Feed Grain Database contains among other things historical entries from the WASDE report. I need this information a lot both in teaching and research. It’s absolutely essential to maintain an accurate historical view of our most important food crops. But the data is presented in an Excel sheet that’s great for viewing,…
Many of you have already heard the news; my family and I moved to Purdue and West Lafayette IN this summer. I’m now in the Agricultural Economics department at Purdue as Associate Professor and Clearing Corporation Chair of Food and Agricultural Marketing. Today marks one month on the job, in fact, and am so excited…
This week China made its first significant purchase of soybeans in the 2018/2019 marketing year - roughly 50 million bushels if my Friday night math is correct. Some headlines note that this week’s purchase is nearly a record for a single day’s purchase. But, clearer heads note that this purchase is really just a drop…
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…
Photo by Dirk Vorderstraße (Mähdrescher von John Deere in der Warburger Börde) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons Post 1 in a series of 3. Post 2 : Machine Learning and Econometrics: Model Selection and Assessment Statistical Learning Style Post 3: Machine Learning and Econometrics: Trees, Random Forests, and Boosting Machine learning and artificial intelligence…
This post is the third 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 use certain…
