The world's most extensive markets for pollination services are those for honey bee pollination in the United States. These markets play important roles in coordinating the behavior of migratory beekeepers, who both produce honey and provide substitutes for ecosystem pollination services. We analyze the economic forces that drive migratory beekeeping and theoretically and empirically analyze the determinants of pollination fees in a larger and richer data set than has been studied before. Our empirical results expand our understanding of pollination markets and market‐supporting institutions that internalize external effects.

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We develop a new event-study technique, the distributional event response model (DERM), appropriate to relatively slowly evolving information events. We apply the model to twelve years of daily lumber futures prices and analyze the effects of three different types of information releases: (a) monthly housing starts estimates, (b) aperiodic administrative and judicial announcements about U.S.-Canada trade disputes, and (c) novel and unprecedented court decisions related to the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The information releases are different in ways that predict their relative speeds of impoundment in prices. We find that housing start events are absorbed more quickly than trade events, which are absorbed more quickly than ESA events. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

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 asa 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 offed beefto corn prices at Omaha constitute the primary explanatory variables. The equations perform exceedingly well over the sample period and in post-sample forecasts with the sample truncated back to 1970.

At sales out breeding bulls, prospective buyers have strong incentives to undertake presale measurement activities. To reduce these transaction costs, sellers often provide information on sale bulls. We examine the information content of two measures of the expected performance of the bulls and find that within a given herd, older, simpler measures of performance contain more information about prices (from buyers' perspectives) than newer, more sophisticated measures known as expected progeny differences, or EPDs. We also find, however, that buyers appear to pay considerable attention to annual changes in herd-average EPD values when comparing animals from different sellers. Copyright 2001, Oxford University Press.