This paper examines the factors responsible for changes in crude oil prices. The paper reviews the statistical behavior of oil prices, relates these to the predictions of theory, and looks in detail at key features of petroleum demand and supply. Topics discussed include the role of commodity...

The establishment recently of risk management vehicles for home prices is described. The potential value of such vehicles, once they become established, is seen in consideration of the inefficiency of the market for single family homes. Institutional changes that might derive from the...

Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as "information markets," "idea futures" or "event futures", are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts. This article summarizes...

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 analyze cross-sectional and time series information from forty-seven equity markets around the world, to consider whether short-sales restrictions affect the efficiency of the market, and the distributional characteristics of returns to individual stocks and market indices. Using the approach...

The paper presents and estimates a model of the prices of oil and other storable commodities, a model that can be characterized as reflecting the carry trade. It focuses on speculative factors, here defined as the trade-off between interest rates on the one hand and market participants'...

A security's expected return can be decomposed into its "carry" and its expected price appreciation, where carry can be measured in advance without an asset pricing model. We find that carry predicts returns both in the cross section and time series for a variety of different asset classes that...

This paper examines the effect of OPEC price increases on the welfare of a group of oil-importing industrial countries. It also studies how taxes or subsidies on oil imports or capital flows could alter the group's welfare. The analysis is conducted using a general-equilibrium model that...

This paper surveys the history of the oil industry with a particular focus on the events associated with significant changes in the price of oil. Although oil was used much differently and was substantially less important economically in the nineteenth century than it is today, there are...