The financialization view is that increased trading in commodity futures markets is associated with increases in the growth rate and volatility of commodity spot prices. This view gained credence because in the 2000s trading volume increased sharply and many commodity prices rose and became more...

We use variance decompositions from high-dimensional vector autoregressions to characterize connectedness in 19 key commodity return volatilities, 2011-2016. We study both static (full-sample) and dynamic (rolling-sample) connectedness. We summarize and visualize the results using tools from...

Even though commodity pricing models have been successful in fitting the term structure of futures prices and its dynamics, they do not generate accurate true distributions of spot prices. This paper develops a new approach to calibrate these models using not only observations of oil futures...

This paper analyzes whether commodity futures prices traded in the United States reveal information relevant to stock prices of East Asian economies including China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. We find significant and positive predictive powers of overnight futures returns of...

The large inflow of investment capital to commodity futures markets in the last decade has generated a heated debate about whether financialization distorts commodity prices. Rather than focusing on the opposing views concerning whether investment flows either did or did not cause a price...

High and volatile prices of major commodities have generated a wide array of analyses and policy prescriptions, including influential studies identifying price bubbles in periods of high volatility. Here we consider a model of the market for a storable commodity in which price expectations are...

The general price level does not provide a sensitive indicator of whether monetary policy is tight or loose, because mostprices are sticky. Interest rates are free to move, but they are an ambiguous indicator of monetary policy: one does not know whether changes in the interest rate are due to...

Countries that specialize in commodity exports often exhibit a correlation between the relevant commodity price and the value of their currency. We explore a natural but little-studied explanation for this correlation. An increase in the commodity price leads to increases in the future values of...

We establish the following stylized facts: (1) Exports are characterized by Big Hits, (2) the Big Hits change from one period to the next, and (3) these changes are not explained by global factors like global commodity prices. These conclusions are robust to excluding extractable products (oil...

It is striking how often countries with oil or other natural resource wealth have failed to grow more rapidly than those without. This is the phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. The principle has been borne out in some econometric tests of the determinants of economic performance...