Temporal Alignment of Prices in the US Beef Marketing Chain

ABSTRACT The objective of this work is to investigate the temporal alignment of prices along the US beef marketing chain. This is pursued by combining two non‐parametric approaches, namely, the Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise and the Dynamic Time Warping. The pattern of temporal alignment depends on the timescale and the period considered. At the medium and (to a lesser extent) the small timescale, there have been switches in the lag‐lead links and changes in the size of phase differences. At the large timescale, the information invariably flows from the markets downstream to markets upstream in the chain. The structural changes in the beef sector do not appear to have any visible effect on the pattern of temporal price alignment whereas the impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic and of the War in Ukraine were short‐lived.