Commodity tax straddles and the valuation of domestic futures exchanges: An analysis of the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act

The Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) of 1981 substantially altered the taxation of commodity tax straddles. Prior to 1981, commodity tax straddles were actively promoted and used to defer income, to convert ordinary income into capital gains, or to convert short-term into long-term capital gains. ERTA imposed a mark-tomarket rule of account settlement for the taxation of futures transactions. This study examines the impact of ERTA on the futures industry by utilizing futures exchange seat prices for all domestic futures exchanges. Futures exchange seats represent specialized capital assets whose value reflects the discounted present value of expected future economic rents derived from trading activity. The results indicate that ERTA produced a large decrease in the market valuation of futures exchange capital which was not recaptured in the ten months following the announcement.The financial support of the Columbia Futures Center was essential to the research reported here. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions, and Matthew Deno, Darrell Petter, and Shan Guo for valuable research assistance.     

The cross section of Chinese commodity futures return

This paper investigates the cross-section of expected commodity futures returns in China using a large panel of 13 individual factors. We find that 6 out of 13 individual factors produce positive and significant returns. To aggregate the information among these factors, we apply not only the traditional Fama-MacBeth regression (FM), but also a set of alternative methods, including the forecast combination method (FC), principal component analysis (PCA), principle component regression (PCR) and partial least squares (PLS). It turns out that PLS outperform other methods in forecasting the cross-section of Chinese expected futures returns. The equally weighted combination of 5 methods produces an even higher annualized return and lower standard deviation compared to each single method. The investigation of factor importance reveals that the skewness (SKEW) factor is more important than other factors in predicting expected futures returns in Chinese markets.     

中国对俄哈两国贸易发展比较研究

2010年以来中国已经成为俄哈两国第一大贸易伙伴.本文从贸易发展规模、贸易差额和贸易商品结构三个方面分析了中国对俄哈两国贸易发展的特点,即中国对俄哈两国贸易规模不断扩大且差距不断缩小;两国的贸易差额长期均以贸易逆差为主,近期转为顺逆差交替出现的阶段;进口商品高度集中在能源资源类商品,出口商品由低附加值商品转为高附加值商品.进而分析了中国对俄哈两国贸易在中国外贸、上海合作组织贸易及在俄哈本国外贸中的地位,从而展现了中国对俄哈两国未来快速发展的良好态势和广阔前景.     

What drove 19th century commodity market integration?

This paper seeks to answer the titular question of what drove commodity market integration in the 19th century. Using grain markets during the first wave of globalization as a testing ground, the paper builds on the insights of the contemporary trade literature and the economic history of the 19th century and relates levels of market integration to cross-sectional and temporal variations in transport technology, geography, monetary regimes, commercial networks/policy, and conflict. The results of this decomposition analysis are interesting on two counts: first, they verify the commonality of experience of the 19th and late 20th centuries; second, they suggest a very strong role for the commercial, diplomatic, and monetary environment in which market integration took place.     

入世以来日本企业对华投资特点

自20世纪80年代到90年代中期,日本企业对华投资共出现了3次高潮。20世纪90年代末期,日本企业对华投资开始减慢,直到2001年12月,在中国入世的带动下,才出现了第四次投资高潮。这一时期的日本企业在投资目的、投资规模、投资产业结构、地区结构等方面都出现了一些新的特点。     

Implications of high food prices for poverty in Pakistan

The study estimates the impacts of rising world food prices on poverty in rural and urban areas of Pakistan. Household income and expenditure data for 2004/2005 is used to estimate compensated and uncompensated price and expenditure elasticities using the linear approximation of the almost ideal demand system. Taking the unexpected component of higher domestic food prices in 2007/2008, own and cross price compensated elasticities are used to derive the changes in the quantity consumed, food expenditure and impacts on poverty assuming the food crisis happened in 2004/2005. The results indicate that poverty increased by 34.8%, severely affecting the urban areas where poverty increased by 44.6% as compared to 32.5% in rural areas. The estimates show that 2.3 million people are unable to reach even one‐half of poverty line expenditures while another 13.7 million are just below and 23.9 million are just above the poverty line. In the short run, it is important to ensure food availability to these people. In the long run, the policy environment of subsidizing urban food consumers by keeping wheat prices lower than the international price, needs to be reconsidered to provide the right incentives to increase food availability.     

What do capital inflows do? Dissecting the transmission mechanism for Thailand, 1980–1996

This paper examines the effects of private financial (non-FDI) capital inflows in Thailand in the pre-crisis period (1980:I–1996:IV). Private capital inflows are found to be associated with higher asset prices, lower lending rates, surges in bank lending and domestic spending driven by higher investment, higher output, modest inflation, and modest real exchange rate appreciation. Inflows are also associated with a greater vulnerability to a liquidity crisis, but not with greater external solvency risk. Current account deficits are temporary, thus sustainable, as exports catch up with higher imports within two years. Consequently, the Thai crisis appears to be more of a liquidity crisis than an external solvency crisis.     

Commodity tax harmonization and the location of industry

We study the positive implications of commodity taxation and tax harmonization under the destination and origin principles when firms are monopolistic competitors facing variable demand elasticity and segmented markets. Our emphasis is on the international location of firms in the presence of market size asymmetries and trade costs. Under the destination principle, an increase in the tax rate of a country always causes some firms to relocate to the other. This effect may be reversed under the origin principle when economic integration is deep enough. Under tax harmonization the choice of a common tax principle is irrelevant for the market outcomes and for the global tax revenues. It affects, however, the distribution of revenues between small and large countries.     

The use of organized commodity markets to manage food import price instability and risk

The article explores the possibility of insuring the price risks of wheat and maize imports of low‐income food‐deficit countries (LIFDCs). Optimal strategies for an importing agent, who hedges with futures and options are derived, based on the objective of minimizing the unpredictability of import bills. Ex post simulations for a set of LIFDCs are run on wheat and maize imports hedged with futures and options in the Chicago Board of Trade, to explore the extent to which hedging reduces the unpredictability in import bills. Simulations encompass both periods of normal price behavior, as well as the period of global upheaval that occurred in 2007 and 2008. Results show that hedging with futures alone affords agents considerable opportunities for reducing import cost unpredictability, and the same holds with options, albeit, to a lesser extent. However, during the recent price spike of 2007–2008, hedging with options would have increased the unpredictability of some countries’ maize import bills, due to the combination of erratic import patterns and pronounced market uncertainty.     

A factor model for co-movements of commodity prices

We fit a factor model to two monthly panels of deflated prices of energy, metals and agricultural commodities. Prices consistently display a tendency to revert towards the factor, though the speed of reversion to the factor is slow. Using both in- and out-of-sample metrics, we compare the factor model to that of a “no change” model and to two simple models that tie changes in commodity prices to percentage change in either global industrial production or the U.S. dollar. The factor model does relatively well at long (12 month) horizons. In terms of commodities, the factor model's performance is best for energy prices, worst for metals, with agricultural prices falling in between.