The 2019 government shutdown increased uncertainty in major agricultural commodity markets
Raghav Goyal and
Michael Adjemian
Food Policy, 2021, vol. 102, issue C
Abstract:
In January 2019, a government shutdown prevented the U.S. Department of Agriculture from publishing information about the situation and outlook for major U.S. agricultural commodities. We show that, as a result, Chicago Mercantile Exchange markets for corn and soybeans experienced heightened uncertainty, elevating the cost of managing risk using options. We use historical options data to estimate that, on the first day of trading following the normally scheduled USDA publication time, the additional commodity market uncertainty caused by the government shutdown increased the price of managing risk using ATM corn and soybean options by 2.95% and 1.66%, respectively, using an approach that assumes a normal January report impact. Using a different counterfactual approach -- assuming that the observed, abnormally large implied volatility reduction following the February 2019 publication would have been experienced in January -- we find that the increase in risk management costs due to missing information was actually about 11.5% for corn and 4.4% for soybeans.
Keywords: WASDE; Implied volatility; USDA reports; Options; Risk; GARCH; Moneyness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D53 Q02 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919221000415
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: The 2019 Government Shutdown Increased Uncertainty in Major Agricultural Commodity Markets (2020) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jfpoli:v:102:y:2021:i:c:s0306919221000415
DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2021.102064
Access Statistics for this article
Food Policy is currently edited by J. Kydd
More articles in Food Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().