 More Reasons Why Farmers Have So Little Interest in Futures MarketsDavid Pannell, Getu Hailu, Alfons Weersink and Amanda Burt No 9232, Working Papers from University of Western Australia, School of Agricultural and Resource Economics Abstract: The use by farmers of futures contracts and other hedging instruments has been observed to be low in many situations, and this has sometimes seemed to be considered surprising or even mysterious. We propose that it is, in fact, readily understandable and consistent with rational decision making. Standard models of the decision about optimal hedging show that it is negatively related to basis risk, to quantity risk, and to transaction costs. Farmers who have less uncertainty about prices have a lower optimal level of hedging. If a farmer has optimistic price expectations relative to the futures market, the incentive to hedge can be greatly reduced. And finally, farmers who have low levels of risk aversion have little to gain from hedging in terms of risk reduction, in that the certainty equivalent payoff at their optimal hedge may be little different to the certainty equivalent under zero hedging. These reasons are additional to the argument of Simmons (2002) who showed that, if capital markets are efficient, farmers can manage their risk exposure through adjusting their leverage, obviating the need for hedging instruments. Keywords: Agricultural; Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:uwauwp:9232 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from University of Western Australia, School of Agricultural and Resource Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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