Etienne, Xiaoli

May, 2023

By: Xu, Yuelu; Elbakidze, Levan; Etienne, Xiaoli
Using county-level data from 1997 to 2018, we examine the effects of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) industry growth on agricultural acreage in the United States. We find that, on average, each active UOG well reduces crop acreage by 3.3 acres in counties with UOG production. However, the impacts vary by region. The relationship is positive in the Southwest, U-shaped in the Great Plains, and negative in Appalachia. Variations of impacts across regions result from differences in geology and historic developments in the energy and agricultural sectors.

August, 2012

By: Colino, Evelyn V.; Irwin, Scott H.; Garcia, Philip; Etienne, Xiaoli
This paper investigates whether the accuracy of outlook hog price forecasts can be improved using composite forecasts in an out-of-sample context. Price forecasts from four widely-recognized outlook programs are combined with futures-based forecasts, ARMA, and unrestricted Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models. Quarterly data are available from 1975.I through 2007.IV for Illinois/Purdue and 1975.I-2010.IV for Iowa, Missouri, and USDA forecasts, which allow for a relatively long out-of-sample evaluation after permitting model specification and appropriate composite-weight training periods. Results show that futures and numerous composite procedures outperform outlook forecasts, but no-change forecasts are inferior to outlook forecasts. At intermediate horizons, OLS composite procedures perform well. The superiority of futures and composite forecasts decreases at longer horizons except for an equal-weighted approach. Importantly, with few exceptions, nothing outperforms the equal-weight approach significantly in any program or horizon. In addition, the equal-weight approach as well as other composite approaches can generally produce larger trading profits compared to outlook forecasts. Overall, findings favor the use of equal-weighted composites, consistent with previous empirical findings and recent theoretical papers.