Price Discovery Process in Livestock Markets: A Causal Analysis

The purpose of this study is to identify the price transmission mechanism in livestock markets in Korea as well as the market, in the marketing hierarchy, that has played important role in price discovery. To this end, this study used a time series analysis based on contemporaneous causal relationship, while taking into account the prices of substitutes as well. It showed that the retail price in beef markets and the wholesale prices in pork markets are most important in price discovery. When a short-term impact occurs, the producer price explains most of forecast error variance in beef and the wholesale price explains most of it in pork. We expect that the result of the study would contribute to understanding price trends and forecasting livestock prices.