Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), pp. 37–62

In this paper, our aim is to analyse the work of Henry L. Moore on the cotton commodity market in the 1910s in the United States. Moore put into practice the institutional approach to economics on two aspects of the cotton economy. The first section of the paper presents Moore’s development of better methods for the prediction of yields. He used the hypothesis of a causal relationship between meteorological phenomena and crop yields to overcome the limitations of the census methods employed by the United States Department of Agriculture. The second section considers Moore’s approaches to fair pricing-related research. In the context of the farmers’ suspicions of speculators and in an effort to stabilize cotton futures markets, the United States Federal Government passed the Cotton Futures Act in 1914, implemented the following year. Its purpose was to standardize the quality of cotton offered in the futures markets. Using the correlation coefficient, Moore validated the effectiveness of this legislation. 

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