Following a sharp drop amidst the global economic crisis and a subsequent recovery, the spot price of crude oil has been broadly stable for the past couple of years. This paper discusses the factors that drive oil demand and supply and, hence, the price of the resource. A set of oil demand...

The Green Paradox posits that fossil fuel markets respond to changing expectations about climate legislation, which limits future consumption, by shifting consumption to the present through lower present-day prices. We demonstrate that oil futures responded negatively to daily changes in the...

This paper shows that extreme energy price changes, located in the 10% tails of the distribution, cluster across energy futures markets during the boom–bust cycle of 2006 to 2012. Using multinominal logit regressions, we find that the coincidence of such tail events cannot be explained solely...

We examine the relation among daily returns to crude oil prices, equity prices, and commodity markets by modifying previous efforts in two important ways; expanding the model to include the equity price for an oil-producing firm, ConocoPhillips, which ameliorates omitted variable bias and...

This study brings fresh data to the highly-charged debate about the price impact of long-only index investment in energy futures markets. We use high frequency daily position data for NYMEX crude oil, heating oil, RBOB gasoline, and natural gas that are available from a representative large...

The value chain for energy and other commodities entails physical conversions through refineries, power plants, storage facilities, and transportation and other capital-intensive infrastructure. When the operation of such commodity conversion assets occurs alongside liquid markets for the input...

The ‘Masters Hypothesis’ is the claim that long-only index investment was a major driver of the 2007–2008 spike in commodity futures prices and energy futures prices in particular. Index position data compiled by the CFTC are carefully compared. In the energy markets, index position...

The "Masters Hypothesis" is the claim that unprecedented buying pressure from new financial index investors created a massive bubble in agricultural futures prices at various times in recent years. This paper analyzes the market impact of financial index investment in agricultural futures...