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.     

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.     

Dynamic spillover effects across petroleum spot and futures volatilities,trading volume and open interest

This paper examines the existence of dynamic spillover effects across petroleum based commodities and among spot-futures volatilities, trading volume and open interest. Realized volatilities of spot-futures markets are used as inputs to estimate a VAR model following Diebold and Yilmaz (2014, 2015) and distinguish dynamic spillovers in total and net effects. Results reveal the existence of large and time-varying spillovers among the spot-futures volatilities and across petroleum-based commodities when examined pairwise. In addition, speculative pressures, as reflected by futures trading volume, and hedging pressures, as reflected by open interest, are shown to transmit large and persistent spillovers to the spot and futures volatilities of crude oil and heating oil-gasoline markets, respectively.     

中国货币政策传导变量的区域结构效应研究

本文基于2007-2019年的数据实证分析利率、信贷、汇率、股票市场和房地产市场等货币政策传导变量对中国八大综合经济区经济增长和物价的影响.研究发现,中国货币政策传导存在明显的区域非对称效应;银行信贷和利率渠道对各区域经济增长和物价影响的方向基本一致,影响幅度存在较大差异;汇率对各区域经济增长、物价影响的方向和幅度均存...     

PRICING CURRENCY OPTIONS UNDER STOCHASTIC INTEREST RATES AND JUMP‐DIFFUSION PROCESSES

We investigate the effects of stochastic interest rates and jumps in the spot exchange rate on the pricing of currency futures, forwards, and futures options. The proposed model extends Bates's model by allowing both the domestic and foreign interest rates to move around randomly, in a generalized Vasicek term‐structure framework. Numerical examples show that the model prices of European currency futures options are similar to those given by Bates's and Black's models in the absence of jumps and when the volatilities of the domestic and foreign interest rates and futures price are negligible. Changes in these volatilities affect the futures options prices. Bates's and Black's models underprice the European currency futures options in both the presence and the absence of jumps. The mispricing increases with the volatilities of interest rates and futures prices. JEL classification: G13     

Quantifying the speculative component in the real price of oil: The role of global oil inventories

One of the central questions of policy interest in recent years has been how many dollars of the inflation-adjusted price of oil must be attributed to speculative demand for oil stocks at each point in time. We develop statistical tools that allow us to address this question, and we use these tools to explore how the use of two alternative proxies for global crude oil inventories affects the empirical evidence for speculation. Notwithstanding some differences, overall these inventory proxies yield similar results. While there is evidence of speculative demand raising the price in mid-2008 by between 5 and 14 dollars, depending on the inventory specification, there is no evidence of speculative demand pressures between early 2003 and early 2008. As a result, current policy efforts aimed at tightening the regulation of oil derivatives markets cannot be expected to lower the real price of oil in the physical market. We also provide evidence that the Libyan crisis in 2011 shifted expectations in oil markets, resulting in a price increase of between 3 and 13 dollars, depending on the inventory specification. With regard to tensions with Iran in 2012, the implied price premium ranges from 0 to 9 dollars.     

Monetary policy for emerging market economies: beyond inflation targeting

Monetary policymakers normally seek to achieve multiple objectives: for prices as well as real economic activity, sometimes for the composition of real activity as well as the aggregate, and often for aspects of the economy's international balance. The fact that monetary policy has only one basic instrument to use therefore creates both complexity and tensions among these objectives. Although inflation targeting represents a way of imposing a logical consistency on monetary policy, in the presence of multiple policy objectives inflation targeting undermines policy transparency and therefore makes accountability more difficult too. Because of the limitation of monetary policy's having only one instrument, but multiple objectives, fiscal policy and prudential supervision and regulation of financial institutions are also important for enabling emerging market economies to achieve their macroeconomic aims.     

The macroeconomic determinants of technology stock price volatility

Stock prices reflect the value of anticipated future profits of companies. Since business cycle conditions impact the future profitability of firms, expectations about the business cycle will affect the current value of firms. This paper uses daily and monthly data from July 1986 to December 2000 to investigate the macroeconomic determinants of US technology stock price conditional volatility. Technology share prices are measured using the Pacific Stock Exchange Technology 100 Index. One of the novel features of this paper is to incorporate a link between technology stock price movements and oil price movements. The empirical results indicate that the conditional volatilities of oil prices, the term premium, and the consumer price index each have a significant impact on the conditional volatility of technology stock prices. Conditional volatilities calculated using daily stock return data display more persistence than conditional volatilities calculated using monthly data. These results further our understanding of the interaction between oil prices and technology share prices and should be of use to investors, hedgers, managers, and policymakers.     

Arbitrage-free market models for option prices: the multi-strike case

This paper studies modeling and existence issues for market models of option prices in a continuous-time framework with one stock, one bond and a family of European call options for one fixed maturity and all strikes. After arguing that (classical) implied volatilities are ill-suited for constructing such models, we introduce the new concepts of local implied volatilities and price level. We show that these new quantities provide a natural and simple parametrization of all option price models satisfying the natural static arbitrage bounds across strikes. We next characterize absence of dynamic arbitrage for such models in terms of drift restrictions on the model coefficients. For the resulting infinite system of SDEs for the price level and all local implied volatilities, we then study the question of solvability and provide sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of a solution. We give explicit examples of volatility coefficients satisfying the required assumptions, and hence of arbitrage-free multi-strike market models of option prices.      

Do monetary policy announcements affect stock prices in emerging market countries? The case of Thailand

We examine the effect of monetary policy announcements in Thailand, which is one of emerging market countries in Asia, on stock prices at the firm level. We find that the expected change, rather than the unexpected change, in interest rates affects stock prices. The stock price response to the interest rate announcement is asymmetric. For instance, the relation between interest rate surprises and stock prices is conditional on the direction of the interest rate change. In general, macroeconomic conditions and firm characteristics cannot explain the stock price reaction to the announcement. In addition, stock prices of firms in different industries appear to react heterogeneously to the interest rate announcement.     

通货膨胀、货币供给与房地产市场关系的实证研究——基于后危机时代数据的考察

我国在2009年底推出的经济政策导致房价和物价不断攀升,央行虽然采取紧缩措施进行应对,但物价和房价仍处高位。对我国货币供给、通货膨胀及房地产之间关系进行理论和实证分析的结果显示:货币供给增加能引起物价和房价上涨;房价上涨能引起物价上涨等。因此,为了更好地应对物价波动,货币政策需关注资产价格,同时应谨慎使用货币政策应对资产泡沫,并密切注意货币流动结构,维持货币供给流向与实体经济发展相适应。     

Monetary policy matters: Evidence from new shocks data

The evidence suggests that monetary policy post 1988 became more forward-looking, invalidating the identifying assumptions in conventional methods of measuring monetary policy's effects, leading to spurious and unlikely results for this period. We propose a new identification scheme that uses factors extracted from Fed Funds futures to measure exogenous changes in policy. Using this shock series in a VAR, we recover the contractionary effect of monetary tightening on output. Moreover, we find that as much as half of the variability in output was driven by monetary policy shocks, and that there is a mild price puzzle.     

Analyzing interest rate risk: Stochastic volatility in the term structure of government bond yields

We propose a Nelson–Siegel type interest rate term structure model where the underlying yield factors follow autoregressive processes with stochastic volatility. The factor volatilities parsimoniously capture risk inherent to the term structure and are associated with the time-varying uncertainty of the yield curve’s level, slope and curvature. Estimating the model based on US government bond yields applying Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques we find that the factor volatilities follow highly persistent processes. We show that yield factors and factor volatilities are closely related to macroeconomic state variables as well as the conditional variances thereof.     

International high-frequency arbitrage for cross-listed stocks

We explore high-frequency arbitrage activities on international cross-listed stocks and develop a methodology to study the effect of information latency in high-frequency trading. We derive statistical arbitrage bounds for a mean-reverting synthetic instrument engineered from cross-listed stock prices, and we propose a new strategy that takes advantage of price deviations outside these bounds. Market frictions such as trade costs, inventory control, and arbitrage risks are considered. The strategy is tested with cross-listed stocks involving three exchanges in Canada and the United States in 2019. The annual net profit with the limit order strategy is around US$6 million, whereas the market order version is not profitable because of the great interconnectedness between exchanges in our data.     

How does house price influence monetary policy transmission?

The literature has focused on house price growth to explain the inefficiency of monetary policy. From the perspective of substitution, this paper explains the relationship between house prices and monetary policy considering not only house price growth but also house price uncertainty. By constructing a theoretical model including both financial-asset and fixed-asset investment, we find that expansionary monetary policy not only promotes total investment but simultaneously also leads to substitution towards financial assets. However, a rise in house price growth or house price uncertainty will mitigate the substitution effect generated by monetary policy. These propositions are supported by empirical data on China's nonfinancial listed firms from 2009 Q1 to 2018 Q3 and the results are robust to a variety of model specifications and empirical approaches. Our findings imply that real estate regulatory policy should coordinate with monetary policy in maximizing fixed-asset investment.     

The effects of relative price changes on the household's demand for money

In examining the economic response to changes in the rate of inflation, models of the demand for money have traditionally assumed that all prices change equiproportionately. This paper alternatively examines the effect on the demand for money of relative price changes. The analysis develops a choice theoretic framework of household behavior by combining a utility maximization framework with the inventory approach to the transactions demand for money. A significant result of the analysis is that the net effect of a change in relative prices on the household's money holding depends on the purchase frequencies and price elasticities of the relevant commodities.     

A Likelihood Ratio Test of Price Volatilities: Comparing Stock Index Spot and Futures

This paper uses three methods to estimate the price volatility of two stock market indexes and their corresponding futures contracts. The classic variance measure of volatility is supplemented with two newer measures, derived from the Garman-Klass and Ball-Torous estimators. A likelihood ratio test is used to compare the classic variance measure of price volatilities of two stock market indexes and their corresponding futures contracts during the bull market of the 1980s. The stock market volatilities of the Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P 500) and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) indexes were found to be significantly lower than their respective futures price volatilities. Since information may flow faster in the futures markets than in the corresponding stock market, our results support Ross's information-volatility hypothesis. It was also noted that the NYSE spot volatility was lower than the S&P 500 spot volatility. If the rate of information flow and firm size are positively related, then the lower NYSE spot volatility is explained by the size effect. The futures price volatilities for the two indexes were insignificantly different from each other. With stock index spot-futures price correlations approaching unity, one implication of our results for index futures activity is that smaller positions in futures contracts may suffice to achieve hedging or arbitrage goals.     

Identifying the interdependence between US monetary policy and the stock market

We estimate the interdependence between US monetary policy and the S&P 500 using structural vector autoregressive (VAR) methodology. A solution is proposed to the simultaneity problem of identifying monetary and stock price shocks by using a combination of short-run and long-run restrictions that maintains the qualitative properties of a monetary policy shock found in the established literature [Christiano, L.J., Eichenbaum, M., Evans, C.L., 1999. Monetary policy shocks: what have we learned and to what end? In: Taylor, J.B., Woodford, M. (Eds.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, vol. 1A. Elsevier, New York, pp. 65-148]. We find great interdependence between the interest rate setting and real stock prices. Real stock prices immediately fall by seven to nine percent due to a monetary policy shock that raises the federal funds rate by 100 basis points. A stock price shock increasing real stock prices by one percent leads to an increase in the interest rate of close to 4 basis points.     

Oil price shocks and their transmission mechanism in an oil-exporting economy: A VAR analysis informed by a DSGE model

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of oil price shocks and the oil shock transmission mechanism in an oil-exporting country, Canada. We use a structural VAR with sign restrictions that comes from a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to jointly identify oil price, domestic supply and U.S. and domestic monetary policy shocks. This identification strategy not only controls for reverse causality from the Canadian and U.S. macroeconomic conditions to the real oil prices, but more importantly, it also allows for contemporaneous interactions between the Canadian and U.S. variables. We find that oil shocks have a stimulative effect on Canadian aggregate demand, appreciate the Canadian dollar, improve the terms of trade and reduce real wages. Foreign disturbances, including innovations in oil prices and the U.S. interest rate, have a significant influence on Canadian economic activities. Our counterfactual analysis indicates that the reaction of the U.S. interest rate as an indirect transmission channel for oil price shocks plays a moderate role in explaining the real exchange rate and inflation, but has negligible impacts on the Canadian output and interest rate.