Limits to arbitrage and hedging: Evidence from commodity markets

We build an equilibrium model of commodity markets in which speculators are capital constrained, and commodity producers have hedging demands for commodity futures. Increases in producers' hedging demand or speculators' capital constraints increase hedging costs via price-pressure on futures. These in turn affect producers' equilibrium hedging and supply decision inducing a link between a financial friction in the futures market and the commodity spot prices. Consistent with the model, measures of producers' propensity to hedge forecasts futures returns and spot prices in oil and gas market data from 1979 to 2010. The component of the commodity futures risk premium associated with producer hedging demand rises when speculative activity reduces. We conclude that limits to financial arbitrage generate limits to hedging by producers, and affect equilibrium commodity supply and prices.     

A Model of Financialization of Commodities

We analyze how institutional investors entering commodity futures markets, referred to as the financialization of commodities, affect commodity prices. Institutional investors care about their performance relative to a commodity index. We find that all commodity futures prices, volatilities, and correlations go up with financialization, but more so for index futures than for nonindex futures. The equity‐commodity correlations also increase. We demonstrate how financial markets transmit shocks not only to futures prices but also to commodity spot prices and inventories. Spot prices go up with financialization, and shocks to any index commodity spill over to all storable commodity prices.     

Informational Cascade in the Insurance Market

We develop an informational cascade model based on Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch (1992) with applications to the insurance market. We investigate the existence of cascades and the effects of public information on cascades. We apply the results to insurance markets to explain how catastrophic events may lead to demand increases, how loss shocks may lead to insurance cycles, and how the heterogeneity of policyholders affects the choice of limited tort auto insurance in Pennsylvania.     

Time-varying impacts of demand and supply oil shocks on correlations between crude oil prices and stock markets indices

This paper investigates the time-varying impacts of demand and supply oil shocks on correlations between changes in crude oil prices and stock markets returns. The findings, obtained by means of a DCC-GARCH from June 2006 to June 2016, indicate that demand shocks positively affected the correlations between crude oil prices and stock market returns from late 2007 to mid-2008, during the apex of the financial markets volatility; from early 2009 to mid-2013, during global economy recovery from the financial crisis; and after 2015, when uncertainties about the Chinese growth and the US economy upturning arose. The dynamic conditional correlation, obtained after the removal of demand shocks effects, presented an average value of 0.13 when all economy sectors were considered and of 0.03 when the energy sector returns were excluded from the stock index. These correlations, still positive on average, suggest that exogenous supply oil shocks had little impact on US mainly enterprises cash flows over the last 10 years. Exceptions are the periods from 2006 to financial crisis and from 2014 until April 2016, when significant and unpredicted changes in oil market happened, considerably affecting the value of the main US companies.     

What changes energy consumption? Prices and public pressures

Policymakers often seek to limit energy prices following market shocks, and instead issue public appeals to reduce demand. This article presents new evidence on how price changes and conservation appeals affect energy consumption, using household‐level data from California's energy crisis during 2000 and 2001. The evidence indicates that when policymakers cap energy prices following market shocks, they preclude substantial—and quite rapid—reductions in energy use. The data also reveal that conservation appeals and informational programs can produce sustained reductions in energy demand.     

Assessing the extreme risk spillovers of international commodities on maritime markets: A GARCH-Copula-CoVaR approach

Maritime market relies on demand of international commodity trade from producers to consumers. Focusing on measuring the inherent correlation, this paper employs a GARCH-Copula-CoVaR approach to address the debate on the extreme risk spillovers from commodity market to maritime market. Our results provide new evidence regarding risk transmission from oil and ex-energy sector to the maritime markets, as well as the interactions between different sub-sectors of maritime market. It is also found that commodity markets exert different spillover effects on global and Chinese domestic maritime markets. In additional, the risk spillovers in oil-freight index pairs after global financial crisis is different from the before. Results enrich the knowledge of risk spillovers between commodity and maritime market, which help stakeholders improve portfolio optimization.     

Liquidity effects on price and return co-movements in commodity futures markets

Commodity price comovement is an important research area in finance, and previous studies have investigated the determinants of price comovement using low-frequency (monthly or quarterly) macroeconomic data. In comparison, our paper attempts to scrutinize the liquidity effect on commodity prices and return movements based on daily data. Our findings contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we find significant positively correlated price movements across different commodity markets on a daily basis, and such comovement is driven by the cross-sectional liquidity spillover effect. Second, we observe that a cointegration relationship between individual commodity prices and the global price index can be established only if the liquidity effect is controlled. Finally, instantaneous daily liquidity shocks (i.e., innovation) exert a negative impact on daily commodity returns. However, liquidity shocks do not have a significant impact on monthly returns. Our findings are robust and have significant implications for macroeconomic policymaking, such as managing inflation risk.     

Speculator activity and the cross-asset predictability of FX returns

This paper tests the gradual information diffusion hypothesis, which suggests that information spreads gradually across asset markets, to explain the role of speculator activity in the cross-asset return predictability of foreign exchange (FX) market strategies. We argue that the activity of speculators increase the rate of information diffusion across asset markets. Hence, we expect the predictive effect from the equity and commodity markets on FX market strategies to be weaker when speculators are active in the FX market. Our results show that, when speculator activity is high, the equity market's ability to predict the FX market dissipates, but not to the same extent as for the commodity market. Our findings suggest that speculators play a vital role in enhancing informational efficiency in the FX market.     

The Impact of Oil Price Shocks on the Returns in China’s Stock Market

The main goal of this paper is to study the relationship between oil price shocks and mainland China’s stock market. From empirical study, we have found that the impact of oil price shocks on stock prices in China has been mixed. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that higher oil prices may cause lower stock prices, positive shocks to oil-market-specific demand resulted in both higher real oil prices and higher stock prices, which helps explain the boom of the Chinese stock market as oil prices were increasing in 2007. However, global oil demand and supply shocks had no significant effects.     

What does futures market interest tell us about the macroeconomy and asset prices?

Economists have traditionally viewed futures prices as fully informative about future economic activity and asset prices. We argue that open interest could be more informative than futures prices in the presence of hedging demand and limited risk absorption capacity in futures markets. We find that movements in open interest are highly pro-cyclical, correlated with both macroeconomic activity and movements in asset prices. Movements in commodity market interest predict commodity returns, bond returns, and movements in the short rate even after controlling for other known predictors. To a lesser degree, movements in open interest predict returns in currency, bond, and stock markets.     

How do oil supply and demand shocks affect Asian stock markets?

This paper examines how oil market shocks affect Asian stock prices using the structural vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Global oil supply and demand shocks are disentangled using sign restrictions and elasticity bounds. Oil price increases are bad news only if the source is from oil-market-specific demand shifts. Northeast Asian stock markets are more resilient as investors’ expectation of continued economic growth outweighs the adverse effect of higher oil prices. Increased global economic activity also stimulates stock prices. Global oil shocks are more important in explaining variability in Asian stock returns compared with the United States, suggesting different dynamics in Asia.     

Effects of speculation and interest rates in a “carry trade” model of commodity prices

The paper presents and estimates a model of the prices of oil and other storable commodities, a model that can be characterized as reflecting the carry trade. It focuses on speculative factors, here defined as the trade-off between interest rates on the one hand and market participants' expectations of future price changes on the other hand. It goes beyond past research by bringing to bear new data sources: survey data to measure expectations of future changes in commodity prices and options data to measure perceptions of risk. Some evidence is found of a negative effect of interest rates on the demand for inventories and thereby on commodity prices and positive effects of expected future price gains on inventory demand and thereby on today's commodity prices.     

Macroeconomic impacts on commodity prices: China vs. the United States

This study compares the macroeconomic impacts of China and the United States on international commodity markets using a factor-augmented vector auto-regression (FAVAR) model with latent factors extracted from a rich data set that includes various macroeconomic and financial indicators at monthly frequency. The main results suggest that whether or not the Chinese demand cause commodity prices to soar depends. Macroeconomic factors of China do have significant impact on commodity markets, but the impacts of the United States outperform those of China in terms of the size of coefficients and their level of significance, as well as the direction and magnitude of directional return spillovers. Moreover, the effects of these factors on individual commodity futures are not a universal phenomenon. Therefore, there is no systematic evidence of a relationship between strong growth in the emerging economy and the boom in commodity futures prices, either statistically or economically.     

Equilibrium Forward Curves for Commodities

We develop an equilibrium model of the term structure of forward prices for storable commodities. As a consequence of a nonnegativity constraint on inventory, the spot commodity has an embedded timing option that is absent in forward contracts. This option's value changes over time due to both endogenous inventory and exogenous transitory shocks to supply and demand. Our model makes predictions about volatilities of forward prices at different horizons and shows how conditional violations of the 'Samuelson effect' occur. We extend the model to incorporate a permanent second factor and calibrate the model to crude oil futures data.     

Price-volume Correlation in the Housing Market: Causality and Co-movements

Housing market cycles are featured by a positive correlation of prices and trading volume, which is conventionally attributed to a causal relationship between prices and volume. This paper analyzes the housing markets in 114 metropolitan statistical areas in the United States from 1990 to 2002, treats both prices and volume as endogenous variables, and studies whether and how exogenous shocks cause co-movements of prices and volume. At quarterly frequency, we find that, first, both home prices and trading volume are affected by conditions in labor markets, the mortgage market, and the stock market, and the effects differ between markets with low and high supply elasticity. Second, home prices Granger cause trading volume, but the effects are asymmetric—decreases in prices reduce trading volume, and increases in prices have no effect. Third, trading volume also Granger causes home prices, but only in markets with inelastic supply. Finally, we find a statistically significant positive price–volume correlation; which, however, is mainly explained by co-movements of prices and volume caused by exogenous shocks, instead of the Granger causality between prices and volume.     

Evidence on the Relationship between Housing and Consumption in the United States: A State‐Level Analysis

We estimate the dynamic effects of U.S. housing market shocks on state‐level spending and home prices from a dynamic common factor model, and identify housing demand and supply shocks using a sign‐restrictions approach. While state‐level spending and house prices gradually respond positively and persistently to aggregate housing demand shocks, there is significant variation across states in the magnitude of these responses. Cross‐state regressions of the estimated responses on an index of mortgage market development suggest that spending in states with greater opportunities for home equity borrowing is more sensitive to housing demand shocks than in states with fewer opportunities, which is consistent with the prominence of a “collateral” channel over a “wealth” channel in explaining the link between housing and the overall economy.     

原油价格与经济政策不确定性对大宗商品市场非对称冲击效应研究

利用面板分位回归模型,考量不同市场环境下原油价格与经济政策不确定性对大宗商品市场非对称性冲击效应。结果表明：油价冲击对中国大宗商品收益的影响具有非对称性,正负油价冲击对其均有促进作用,但随着市场环境好转,正油价冲击的作用逐渐增强,负油价冲击则逐渐减弱;政策不确定性对大宗商品收益有促进作用,但在牛市环境下有抑制作用;且危机前后,油价冲击对大宗商品收益的影响存在非对称性效应。     

Price leadership and asynchronous movements of multi-market listed stocks

We examine the asynchronous price movements of the same assets traded on multiple markets, each of which has its unique characteristics. Differently from the existing literature, we use a dynamic structural Vector Autoregressive (VAR) setting to explore the effects of market-wide and idiosyncratic shocks on both home and host listings. We find strong evidence that foreign prices lead home prices, but not the reverse effect. Contrary to theory predictions, investors in the firms’ home market respond to idiosyncratic fluctuations in the stock returns in the host markets. Our results suggest that investors pay attention to fluctuations in the stocks listed on the more institutionally developed markets.     

China's Imported Inflation and Global Commodity Prices

In this paper, we outline China's imported inflation via global commodity prices. We show that the prices of China's imported commodities are strongly related to global commodity prices. Meanwhile, the final goods prices from upstream industries are strongly influenced by global commodity prices. However, this effect is partially offset by the production process—that is, the final goods prices in downstream industries are generally less affected by global prices. This indicates that China's commodity market has a close link with global commodity markets. Therefore, high global commodity prices generally squeeze profits in China's downstream industries; upstream industries generally benefit from high global commodity prices.     

Price and Investment Dynamics: Theory and Plant-Level Data

We construct a model of a firm competing for market share in a customer market and making investments in physical capital. The firm is financially constrained and there are implementation lags in investment. Our model predicts that product prices should depend on costs and competitors' prices but respond weakly to demand shocks. Also, prices should be strongly related to investment. We estimate price and investment equations on panel data for Swedish manufacturing plants and find results that are qualitatively in line with these predictions, though the relation between investment and prices is stronger than predicted by our model.