In this paper, we revisit price and volatility transmission among natural gas, fertilizer, and corn markets; an important issue was explored in previous work. An update of the results is urgently needed due to the recent enormous price volatility in the commodities, fertilizer, and energy markets. We followed the same methodology as previous work and used the vector error correction model and the multivariate generalized autoregressive heteroskedasticity model, but we adopted a new methodology to gather higher frequency data for fertilizer to estimate the interactions and examine the mechanisms between these market prices. Our results are consistent with previous research showing that natural gas price returns in the short-term are significantly affected by its lagged returns from itself and corn markets, and it will be affected by its lagged return sand fertilizer markets. However, we did not find a significant relationship among fertilizer, corn, and natural gas markets from May to November 2021. Moreover, the lagged conditional volatility of corn prices will affect the conditional volatility in the natural gas market but not vice versa.

Automatic milking systems (AMSs) have become increasingly common in the US in the past few years. Recent surveys from Idaho, one of the largest dairy-producing states, as well as from other states and countries, suggest that: 1. among farms adopting robotic milking systems, few are reporting less labor usage after adopting this labor-saving technology; 2. small farms rather than large farms are adopting (or more interested in adopting) robotic milking systems. In this article, we propose a series of new modeling strategies, which introduces the role of general-equilibrium effects to explain these new stylized facts. We show that: first, farms adopting labor-saving technology may, in fact, use more labor to compensate for the loss in the value of labor; second, when smaller farms experience more labor efficiency gains or value their leisure time (or off-farm income) more, they are more likely than larger farms to adopt the new technology. We contribute to the technology-adoption literature in two important ways. First, to our knowledge, this is the first article that introduces general-equilibrium effects to the technology-adoption literature. Second, this is also the first article that provides a theoretical perspective to explain the stylized facts in the adoption of robotic milking systems.