Trial Lecture and Public Defence: Marie Gotteberg Steen

Helga Sigurdardottir

Marie Gotteberg Steens trial lecture on the theme: Commodity markets and price volatility - managing price risk will take place at 12.15 pm on November 26th 2010 in the Auditorium, T401 in the Tower Building.

Marie Steen Photo:

Steens thesis is titled The Flower Markets: Five essays on flower prices 1993-2008. After the trial lecture she will defend her thesis.

The dissertation consists of five independent, but related essays. The aim of the first essay, “A world of flowers: Dutch flower auctions and the market for cut flowers (in print in Journal of Applied Horticulture, 2010)” is to give an overview of international flower production, consumption and trade.

The purpose of the second essay, “Forecasting prices at the Dutch flower auctions” is to establish short-term price forecasting models which can be applied in the production and marketing of flowers. Marie Steen wrote this essay with her supervisor, Ole Gjølberg, as the co-author, and it has been published in Journal of Agricultural Economics (Steen and Gjølberg, 1999).

The third essay “Forecasting prices at the Dutch flower auctions: A partial least squares approach” is a follow-up on the second paper in two important ways. First, the dataset now includes 11 additional years of weekly data on prices of the same varieties of cut flowers, which gives a much stronger basis for making conclusions. Second, this paper offers an alternative methodological approach. Forecasts are established based on partial least squares (PLS) regressions. This essay establishes forecasting models that can be applied in the production planning and marketing of cut flowers and investigates whether partial least squares (PLS) can be recommended as a better forecasting method compared to alternative models.

Essay four, “Price-quantity relationships in the Dutch flower market: Is there a potential for strategic behavior?” is submitted for publication in “Journal of International Food & Agribusiness Marketing”. The essay is a contribution to bridge that gap, resenting econometric evidence on price-quantity relationships for three major varieties of cut flowers at the Dutch flower auctions.

Env. Photo:

Finally, the fifth essay “Risk management in the flower business” is addressing price risk. This is a substantially revised version of a previous paper, "A Portfolio Approach to Cooperative Risk Management", published in Journal of Cooperatives, 14 (1):21-29 (Gjolberg and Steen, 1999) . Flower producers face significant price risk, as do producers of other biological products. However, while producers of wheat, corn, hogs etc. may hedge price risk in well functioning futures markets, no such risk management instrument is readily available in the flower business. This essay suggests that flower producers take a portfolio approach to reduce risk. This means that individual producers diversify across different flower varieties. Since, however, such an individual multi-product approach may be costly; an alternative might be to achieve the diversification effect by pooling risk in a joint (“co-operative”), multi-variety portfolio. The aim of the essay is to analyze the risk reduction potential from such diversification, individually or in a pool of producers.

More on the lecture and defence here.

Vårblomst Photo: Randi Setrom Brunborg

Published: 16.11.10
Updated: 24.11.10
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