Boom and Bust in Power Plant Construction: Lessons from the California Electricity Crisis

This article argues that competitive electricity markets are prone to the same cycles of boom and bust that appear in commodity markets and in a specialized industry like real estate. The article then demonstrates how boom and bust might appear in the western electricity system using computer simulation. A “business as usual” simulation shows that the west might be at the crest of a building boom and on the verge of a bust in wholesale prices. Without fundamental changes in the wholesale markets, the next construction boom would come too late to prevent a decline in reserve margins and the reappearance of price spikes. If we continue with the current market structure, we run the risk of exposing the western electricity markets to another round of reliability alerts and price spikes. The article concludes with suggestions for alternative market structures in California and a discussion of whether these suggestions apply to other countries engaged in electricity restructuring.     

Arbitrage,cointegration, and the joint dynamics of prices across discrete commodity futures auctions

Underlying the search for arbitrage opportunities across commodity futures markets that differ in market structure is the idea that the futures prices for similar commodities that are traded on different exchanges adjusted for differences in currency, delivery time (if any), location, and market structure are equal. This article examines price linkages in competing discrete commodity futures auction markets. We find no evidence of cointegration of futures prices of similar commodities traded on two contemporaneous discrete auction futures exchanges in Asia. We also find no evidence of arbitrage activities across these two Asian exchanges, though this does not preclude arbitrage activities with North American continuous auction markets. This lack of cointegration may be due to nonstationarities in the trading cost component. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 799–815, 1999     

Global excess liquidity and asset prices in emerging countries: A PVAR approach

The overly accommodating monetary policy is often accused of creating surplus liquidity and bubbles on the asset markets. In particular, it could have contributed to strong capital inflows in emerging countries, which may have had a significant impact on financial stability in these countries, affecting domestic financing conditions and creating a risk of upward pressures on asset prices. We focus in this paper on the impact of global excess liquidity on goods and asset prices for a set of emerging market countries by estimating a panel VAR model. We define first global liquidity and highlight situations of excess liquidity. We then find that excess liquidity at global level has spillover effects on output and price levels in emerging countries. The impact on real estate, commodity and share prices in emerging countries is less clear.     

Dependence of stock and commodity futures markets in China: Implications for portfolio investment

We examine the recent trends in dependence structure between the fast-growing commodity markets and the stock markets in China. We address this issue by using copula functions that allow for measuring both average and tail dependence. Our results provide evidence of low and positive correlations between these markets, suggesting that commodity futures are a desirable asset class for portfolio diversification. By comparing the market risks of alternative portfolio strategies, we show that Chinese investors can take advantage of commodity futures during different times to realize risk diversification and downside risk reduction benefits.     

Commodity Markets and Commodity Mutual Funds

Fundamental economic factors—market demand and supply conditions—provide the most consistent explanation for trends in commodity prices from 2004 to 2011. This paper presents empirical evidence that the rise and fall of commodity prices on a monthly basis can be strongly linked to the value of the U.S. dollar and the world business cycle—in particular, to the strength or weakness in emerging market economies such as China, Brazil, India, and Russia. Despite concerns raised by some policymakers that increased commodity index investment (the financialization of commodities) has driven commodity price movements, numerous academic studies have concluded that index-based investing has not moved prices or exacerbated volatility in commodity markets in recent years. An examination of weekly and monthly net flows into commodity mutual funds reveals that these flows have little or no effect on the overall growth rate of commodity prices. In particular, weekly flows into commodity mutual funds do not lead to future commodity price changes. These results are consistent with academic papers that find little or no impact of commodity index investors on commodity prices in individual markets. The paper concludes by briefly discussing three key factors that illustrate why flows into commodity mutual funds cannot explain commodity price movements.     

On commodity price limits

This paper examines the behavior of futures prices and trader positions around the occurrence of price limits in commodity futures markets. We ask whether limit events are the result of shocks to fundamental volatility or the result of temporary volatility induced by the trading of noncommercial market participants (speculators). We find little evidence that limits events are the result of speculative activity, but instead associated with shocks to fundamentals that lead to persistent price changes. When futures trading halts price discovery migrates to options markets, but option prices provide a biased estimate of subsequent future prices when trading resumes.     

Valuation of futures and commodity options with information costs

In this article, futures and commodity options are analyzed in the context of Merton's (1987) model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information. First, following Dusak (1973) and Black (1976), the conditions under which Merton's model can be applied to the valuation of forward and futures contracts are proposed. Then an application to futures markets is given. We provide a partial differential equation and the formulas for European commodity options, futures contracts, and American options in the same context. The models are simulated and compared to standard models with no information costs. We find that model prices are not significantly different from standard model prices. However, our models correct for some pricing biases in standard models. In particular, they reduce the overvaluation bias for European and American commodity options. It seems that the costs of gathering and processing information regarding the option and its underlying asset play a role in explaining the biases observed in standard models. This work can be applied to other futures markets. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 645–664, 1999     

资源性商品国际市场上中国的市场势力研究——以焦炭、稀土为例

本文针对中国作为众多资源性商品的出口大国却陷入定价小国的这一困境,提出了中国大市场悖论这一论点,并以焦炭、稀土这两大重要的资源性商品市场为研究对象,证实了这一悖论的存在。实证研究表明,中国在焦炭产业已初具规模化生产特征,焦炭、稀土等资源性商品出口市场都是非完全竞争市场。中国在21个焦炭出口市场中,仅在孟加拉、墨西哥等少数市场拥有一定的市场势力。中国在19个稀土出口市场中,仅在日本和英国市场拥有有限的市场势力。基于中国具有资源优势而定价权有限的现状,本文提出了在焦炭市场推行碳排放交易,在稀土市场加强应用开发研究,构建资源性商品出口价格联盟以及组建焦炭、稀土欧佩克等政策建议。     

Asymmetric information in commodity futures markets: Theory and empirical evidence

This article examines the theoretical and empirical implications of asymmetric information in commodity futures markets. In particular, it formulates and tests a theoretical model that recognizes two distinct categories of traders: hedgers, who participate in both spot and futures markets, and speculators, who participate only in the futures market. Speculators are assumed to possess differential information about the realized values of selected random variables. Multiperiod futures market equilibria are derived under competitive conditions, and the ability of futures markets to forecast changes in equilibrium spot market prices are examined. The key variable is shown to be the randomness and informational asymmetry in the aggregate supply by participating hedgers in the spot market, whose absence turns out to be the major determinant of the revelation of informational asymmetry. Moreover, under the assumption of independence of error forecasts for prices and spot market supplies, it is shown that futures market equilibrium ends up with linear expressions for prices and futures contract volumes. These linear expressions are then used to develop empirically testable models. The main empirical implications in these models revolve around the role of the basis as a predictor of future spot price changes. The paper provides an empirical investigation of these implications, using three commodities traded on the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange (WCE). © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 18:803–825, 1998     

Asset storability and price discovery in commodity futures markets: A new look

This article examines the price discovery performance of futures markets for storable and nonstorable commodities in the long run, allowing for the compounding factor of stochastic interest rates. The evidence shows that asset storability does not affect the existence of cointegration between cash and futures prices and the usefulness of future markets in predicting future cash prices. However, it may affect the magnitude of bias of futures markets’ estimates (or predictions) for future cash prices. These findings have several important implications for commodity production decision making, commodity hedging, and commodity price forecasting. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21:279–300, 2001     

The macroeconomic effects of commodity market disruptions in open economies

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effects of two of the principal causes of the commodity price boom in 1973-74: bad harvests and commodity speculation. The analysis uses a dynamic, fixprice-flexprice model in which exchange rates are flexible and commodities serve as both an asset and a consumption good. Commodity market disruptions of the magnitude that occurred in 1973-74 are shown to have significant effects on prices, exchange rates, trade flows, and capital flows — effects that persist long after the initial shock has passed. Asset markets, defined to include commodity markets, play a central role in transmitting these shocks throughout the world economy.     

Exchange market pressure,commodity prices,and contagion in Latin America

Over the past two decades, Latin American currencies have faced not only pressure to devalue but also periods of uncomfortable appreciation. Domestic macroeconomic factors, as well as global events and contagion, might bear part of the responsibility. This study constructs a monthly index of exchange market pressure (EMP) for four Latin American countries before using vector autoregressive methods to test the influence of commodity prices, macroeconomic variables, and external factors on each country's index. While inflation is an important determinant of EMP, we conclude that Chile and Peru are more likely than Mexico and Brazil to face pressure when commodity prices fall. This supports the idea that these two countries have “commodity currencies” and that their exchange markets are most vulnerable to international contagion.     

中国内地与香港商品市场一体化测度研究——以北京、上海、广州、深圳为例

采用世界主要城市物价指针数据库中北京、上海、广州、深圳和香港一篮子商品零售价格数据测度了中国内地与香港商品市场的一体化程度。研究表明,中国内地与香港的商品价格差异在逐步缩小,市场呈现一体化趋势,而且CEPA的实施更加推动了两地商品市场一体化进程。随着CEPA的推进,中国内地与香港将从合作走向融合并最终实现市场的大一统。     

Noninformative and informative tests of efficiency in three energy futures markets

This article presents a critique of tests of market efficiency commonly applied to energy futures markets. Most of this literature fails to deal adequately with the endogeneity, nonstationarity, and cointegration characteristics of spot and futures prices, resulting in tests that are not informative about market efficiency. Consistent with this literature, application of these noninformative tests to spot and futures prices from three energy markets is generally not supportive of market efficiency. The article also presents two alternative tests of efficiency that properly deal with the stochastic features of these price series. Nonstationary data can be modeled with cointegration methods, allowing valid tests of the efficiency hypothesis. Alternatively, testing the equivalence of the data generation processes of the spot and futures prices provides an informative approach to efficiency testing with stationary data that does not suffer from endogeneity problems. Application of these two tests is largely supportive of weak and semistrong efficiency in three energy futures markets. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 18: 939–964, 1998     

The relative efficiency of commodity futures markets

The ability of futures markets to predict subsequent spot prices has been a controversial topic for a number of years. Empirical evidence to date is mixed; for any given market, some studies find evidence of efficiency, others of inefficiency. In part, these apparently conflicting findings reflect differences in the time periods analyzed and the methods chosen for testing. A limitation of existing tests is the classification of markets as either efficient or inefficient with no assessment of the degree to which efficiency is present. This article presents tests for unbiasedness and efficiency across a range of commodity and financial futures markets, using a cointegration methodology, and develops a measure of relative efficiency. In general, the findings suggest that spot and futures prices are cointegrated with a slope coefficient that is close to unity, so that the postulated long-run relationship is accepted. However, there is evidence that the long-run relationship does not hold in the short run; specifically, changes in the spot price are explained by lagged differences in spot and futures prices as well as by the basis. This suggests that market inefficiencies exist in the sense that past information can be used by agents to predict spot price movements. A measure of the relative degree of inefficiency (based on forecast error variances) is then used to compare the performance of different markets. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 413–432, 1999     

Financial super-markets: size matters for asset trade

Empirically, demand and market size effects play an important role for international trade in assets and the determination of asset prices. Financial integration decreases the cost of capital, asset prices increase with investors base and market size determines international financial flows. We present a two-country model with an endogenous number of financial assets, where the interaction of a risk diversification motive and market segmentation explains those facts. In our set up, an imperfectly competitive structure of financial markets emerges naturally and provides a new source for home bias in equity holdings. Due to co-ordination failures, the extent of financial market incompleteness is inefficiently high in equilibrium.     

Stock market correlations between China and its emerging market neighbors

We examine interlinkages of stock return behavior for China and three emerging market neighbors from the Asia Pacific region from November 1993 to July 2008. Results are based on a VAR model. Impulse responses and vector decomposition of VAR are also utilized. Evidence suggests that the aggregate markets are mostly not interrelated. However, we observe relations between China and the other markets when foreign investor returns are specifically accounted for. In addition, a shock originating in China is significantly felt in the other equity markets. Stock market characteristics and macroeconomic conditions of these countries may help explain the observed relations.     

Scalability and robustness of a network resource allocation system using market-based agents

In this paper, we consider issues associated with scalability and robustness in designing a market-based multi-agent system that allocates bandwidth in a communications network. Specifically, an empirical evaluation is carried out to assess the system performance under a variety of design configurations in order to provide an insight into network deployment issues. This extends our previous work in which we developed an application that makes use of market-based software agents that compete in decentralised marketplaces to buy and sell bandwidth resources in a network that is partitioned into regions, each with a separate market server. We investigate the average call success rate and average message load per market server, as the number of markets are scaled up in a fixed size network. The same investigations are performed in the presence of single market failures. Finally, for both the failure and non-failure cases, a trade-off is found between their average call success rates and message load per server in order to find an optimum number of regions to deploy in the network.     

Toward A Convergence Theory For Continuous Stochastic Securities Market Models1

This article reviews some recently developed approximation schemes for financial markets with continuous trading. Two methods for approximating continuous-time stochastic securities market models whose exogenously given prices have continuous sample paths are described and compared One method approximates both the paths and the information structure; the other is an approximation in distribution with a Markovian structure. In both cases, the approximating models have a finite state space, discrete time, and possess the same “structural” properties (e.g., “no arbitrage” and “completeness”) as the continuous model. the latter characteristic is an important criterion for judging the merits of the approximations. Taking advantage of the “structure-preserving” characteristic, one can formulate a convergence theory for frictionless markets with continuous trading. the theory provides convergence results for objects such as contingent claim prices, replicating portfolio strategies (hedging policies), optimal consumption policies, and cumulative financial gains (i.e., stochastic integrals), which are constructed along the approximation. the convergence theory enables one to combine the intuitive appeal of discrete models and the analytic tractability of continuous models to provide new insight into the theory of modern financial markets. We survey the current state of such a convergence theory and illustrate the results with some examples of well-known continuous securities market models.     

A cointegrated commodity pricing model

We propose a commodity pricing model that extends the Gibson–Schwartz two‐factor model to incorporate the effect of linear relations among commodity spot prices, and provide a condition under which such linear relations represent cointegration. We derive futures and call option prices for the proposed model, and indicate that, unlike in Duan and Pliska (2004), the linear relations among commodity prices should affect commodity derivative prices, even when the volatilities of commodity returns are constant. Using crude oil and heating oil market data, we estimate the model and apply the results to the hedging of long‐term futures using short‐term ones.