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.     

Belief Dispersion in the Stock Market

We develop a dynamic model of belief dispersion with a continuum of investors differing in beliefs. The model is tractable and qualitatively matches many of the empirical regularities in a stock price and its mean return, volatility, and trading volume. We find that the stock price is convex in cash‐flow news and increases in belief dispersion, while its mean return decreases when the view on the stock is optimistic, and vice versa when pessimistic. Moreover, belief dispersion leads to higher stock volatility and trading volume. We demonstrate that otherwise identical two‐investor heterogeneous‐beliefs economies do not necessarily generate our main results.     

Strategic Asset Allocation in Money Management

This paper analyzes the dynamic portfolio choice implications of strategic interaction among money managers who compete for fund flows. We study such interaction between two risk‐averse managers in continuous time, characterizing analytically their unique equilibrium investments. Driven by chasing and contrarian mechanisms when one is well ahead, they gamble in the opposite direction when their performance is close. We also examine multiple and mixed‐strategy equilibria. Equilibrium policy of each manager crucially depends on the opponent's risk attitude. Hence, client investors concerned about how a strategic manager may trade on their behalf should also learn competitors' characteristics.