The last decade brought substantial increased participation in commodity markets by index funds that maintain long positions in the near futures contracts. Policy makers and academic studies have reached sharply different conclusions about the effects of these funds on commodity futures prices....

Motivated by the literature on limits-to-arbitrage, we build an equilibrium model of commodity markets in which speculators are capital constrained, and commodity producers have hedging demands for commodity futures. Increases (decreases) in producers' hedging demand (speculators' risk-capacity)...

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 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...

Recent experience has given rise to the financialization view: increased trading in commodity fu­tures markets leads to an increase in the level and volatility of spot prices. We construct a large panel data set which includes commodities with and without futures markets. The data do not...

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...

We study whether exchange traded funds (ETFs)--an asset of increasing importance--impact the volatility of their underlying stocks. Using identification strategies based on the mechanical variation in ETF ownership, we present evidence that stocks owned by ETFs exhibit significantly higher...

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...

This paper analyzes a novel data set of commodity futures prices over a long sample period starting in 1877, which allows us to shed new light on several important and controversial questions. We document that commodity futures returns (1) have been positive on average; (2) vary significantly...

This is a summary and interpretation of some of the literature on stock price volatility that was stimulated by Leroy and Porter (1981) and Shiller (1981a). It appears that neither small sample bias, rational bubbles nor some standard models for expected returns adequately explain stock price...