Explaining Indian Egg Price Dynamics: Seasonal Patterns, Feed Costs, and Diesel Prices, 2013–2025

This study examines the primary determinants of CPI-adjusted monthly producer egg prices in India from January 2013 through December 2025. The analysis uses 156 monthly observations constructed from daily National Egg Coordination Committee city-level egg-price quotations. Explanatory variables include CPI-adjusted World Bank maize and soybean-meal benchmark prices, domestic diesel prices, a COVID-19-period indicator, a linear trend, and calendar-month fixed effects. Ordinary least squares regression models were estimated sequentially to assess the contribution of each group of variables. Models containing only feed prices, diesel prices, the COVID indicator, and trend explained little of the variation in producer egg prices, with the highest pre-seasonality R-squared equal to .046. The inclusion of month fixed effects substantially improved model performance: the final model explained 63.8% of monthly variation in CPI-adjusted producer egg prices, with an adjusted R-squared of .596. Producer egg prices were significantly lower than January prices in most months between February and October, with the largest reduction occurring in April. December prices were significantly higher than January prices. These results indicate that recurring seasonal variation is the dominant observed correlate of monthly producer egg-price movements. Among the non-seasonal variables, soybean meal was positively and statistically significantly associated with producer egg prices. Maize, diesel, the COVID-period indicator, and the linear trend were not statistically significant after controlling for seasonality and the other covariates. The findings should be interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal effects because the study uses aggregated observational data, global feed-price benchmarks rather than domestic farm-level feed prices, and a level-regression framework with mixed stationarity properties.