Countries that rely on private investors to find and exploit their mineral resources need reliable indicators of their investment attractiveness. This study explores the use of exploration expenditures for this purpose, focusing primarily on Chile. It finds that exploration expenditures can...

The on-going debate over the influence of investor demand on spot commodity prices largely attempts to assess this influence by measuring the growth in investor demand in recent years. Given the serious data problems that plague such analyses, this article pursues another approach in the hope of...

In a recent article (Tilton et al., 2011), we argue that even when investor stocks are declining an increase in investor demand can cause a commodity's price to rise, a conclusion that is both contrary to conventional wisdom and counter-intuitive. In his comment on our article, Olle Östensson...

This, our second reply to Östensson, supplements our earlier more technical analysis with a simple intuitive explanation of how investor demand can be driving commodity prices higher even when investor stocks are falling.