Commodity index investment and food prices: does the “Masters Hypothesis” explain recent price spikes?

The “Masters Hypothesis” is the claim that unprecedented buying pressure in recent years from commodity index investors created massive bubbles in food and energy prices. The purpose of this article is to review the evidence from recent studies that investigate the empirical relationship between index investment and price movements in agricultural futures markets. One line of research uses time‐series regression tests, such as Granger causality tests, to investigate the relationship between price movements and index positions. This research provides little evidence in support of the Masters Hypothesis in agricultural futures markets. A second line of research uses cross‐sectional regression tests and studies in this area provide very limited evidence in favor of the Masters Hypothesis for agricultural futures markets. A third line of research investigates whether there is a significant relationship between commodity index trading and the difference, or spread, between futures prices of different contract maturities on the same date. These studies report a range of results depending on the type of test. However, the bulk of the evidence indicates either no relationship or a negative relationship, which is once again inconsistent with the Masters Hypothesis. Overall, this growing body of literature fails to find compelling evidence that buying pressure from commodity index investment in recent years caused a massive bubble in agricultural futures prices. The Masters Hypothesis is simply not a valid characterization of reality.     

基于系统动力学的住宅价格预测研究

在系统动力学模型中将城市商品住宅价格系统划分为宏观经济、城市人口、市场需求、市场供给、房屋租赁和土地价值六个子系统,并引入了住宅开发投资及其比例、供求比影响因子、住宅销售面积中成交比例、开发利润率和基建投资等影响因子。通过仿真比较了桂林市商品住宅价格与人均可支配收入、住宅开发投资、 GDP 等主要因素的变动情况,分析了长期和短期各主要因素对商品住宅价格影响程度和时序,以此确定政府在不同时期以控制商品住宅价格为目的所应采取的宏观调控措施和手段,同时为消费者和房地产开发商择机购房和投资提供相应的决策依据。     

Learning and price volatility in duopoly models of resource depletion

The combination of learning and depletion in non-renewable resource markets adds significant volatility to commodity prices. The market consists of a small number of suppliers who make depletion plans based on their perceptions of how sensitive price is to supply. Learning leads to changes in these perceptions and hence the revision of depletion plans, which can have a dramatic effect on market supply and price. Firstly, price trends upwards faster than the rate of time preference as the non-renewable resource approaches exhaustion. Secondly, there are frequent escape episodes in which price rises rapidly before gradually falling back. The striking volatility and nonstationarity in commodity prices that results has parallels in oil price data.     

全面认识和正确理解社会主义市场经济

社会主义市场经济体制为实现中国经济的跨越式发展提供了体制活力与制度保障.本文旨在突破经济学概念的西方范式,立足中国经济发展伟大成功实践,提出全面认识和正确理解社会主义市场经济.本文从市场经济的概念入手,论述了市场的概念、性质及其与商品经济的关系,提出市场经济的本质是交换经济.与此同时,提出开放性是社会主义市场经济的最鲜...     

Which Central and Eastern European country has the greatest potential for housing market recovery？

This paper is concentrated on analyzing the CEE （Central and Eastern European） countries housing and lending market development in 2002-2009. These countries experienced real estate boom and bust phases during that time and the aim of this paper is to understand which of these countries have the greatest potential for housing market recovery. The study has conducted comparable analysis of these countries and their real estate and lending market. The data was collected from central banks, national statistic offices and real estate companies. The results suggest that countries with higher housing debt had stronger real estate booms and the current bust-cycle has caused much steeper decline in prices. This paper attempts to look at the CEE housing markets from the developer＇s or investor＇s point of view and may be useful for banks and other financial institutions which are related to housing market and lending.     

供需因素对城市商品住宅价格的影响及其空间分布

从供给和需求的角度出发,选择我国35个大中城市1999-2007年的住宅相关数据构建了其需求和供给模型,得出各变量对住宅价格的影响关系,并运用逐步回归法确定了每个大中城市住宅价格的主要影响因素,进而揭示了35个大中城市商品住宅价格主要影响因素的空间分布,并据此对35个大中城市进行了分类.     

Trends in international commodity prices: Panel unit root analysis

The purpose of this paper is to examine the behavior of international commodity prices within the context of the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis. To this end, I utilize a panel unit root approach which is able to account for multiple structural breaks and cross-section dependency. The unit root analysis for 24 international commodity prices during the period 1900–2003 shows evidence in favor of the trend stationary process in the commodity prices. The results thereby imply that shocks to commodity prices are temporary in nature and tend to be corrected over time. The estimation of the trend stationary models indicates that the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis is not a universal phenomenon.     

On the behavior of commodity prices when speculative storage is bounded

This paper investigates the implications of bounded speculative storage, storage bounded from below at zero and above at a capacity, on commodity prices. Binding capacity mirrors the non-negativity constraint on storage and leads to negative price spiking and higher volatility when the market is in deep contango, i.e. low current prices at high stock levels. With bounded storage there is no need to restrict storage to be costly to ensure a rational expectations equilibrium. This allows the model to cover a wide range of storage technologies, including free and productive storage. We also provide an alternative expression for speculative prices that highlights the key role of the storage boundaries. The competitive equilibrium price is the sum of discounted future probability weighted boundary prices. The boundary prices can be viewed as dividends on commodities in storage reflecting the realization of economic profits from storage.     

THE EMPIRICAL MERIT OF STRUCTURAL EXPLANATIONS OF COMMODITY PRICE VOLATILITY: REVIEW AND PERSPECTIVES

This paper presents both the history of and state‐of‐the‐art in empirical modeling approaches to the world commodity price volatility. The analysis builds on the storage model and key milestones in its development. Specifically, it is intended to offer a reader unfamiliar with the relevant literature an insight into the modeling issues at stake from both a historical and speculative viewpoint. The review considers primarily the empirical techniques designed to assess the merits of the storage theory; it does not address purely statistical approaches that do not rely on storage theory and that have been studied in depth in other streams of the commodity price literature. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future research to try to resolve some of the existing empirical flaws, and hopefully to increase the explanatory power of the storage model.     

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.