This article contributes to the debate about the relative qualities of floor and electronic trading systems by analysing the effects of bringing forward the Xetra closing time from 8.00 pm to 5.30 pm in November 2003, while the Frankfurt floor remains open until 8.00 pm. This natural...

Motivated by repeated price spikes and crashes over the last decade, we investigate whether the intensive investment activities of commodity index traders (CITs) have destabilized agricultural futures markets. Using a stochastic volatility model, we treat conditional volatility as an unobserved...

Motivated by repeated price spikes and crashes over the last decade, we investigate whether the growing market shares of futures speculators destabilize commodity spot prices. We approximate conditional volatility and analyze how it is affected by speculative open interest. In this context, we...

This paper challenges the existing literature examining the impact of the introduction of index futures trading on the volatility of its underlying. To overcome econometric shortcomings of previously published work using the dummy variable approach, we employ a Markov-switching-GARCH technique....

This paper examines whether the introduction of Chinese stock index futures had an impact on the volatility of the underlying spot market. To this end, we estimate several Generalized Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models and compare our findings for mainland China with...

It is still an unanswered question how much trading activity is needed for efficient price discovery in commodity futures markets. For this purpose, we investigate the price discovery process of two thinly traded agricultural futures contracts traded at the European Exchange in Frankfurt. Our...

Using unique data about capital flows to private pension funds in Poland, we find that their impact, as a group of large institutional investors, on stock returns is statistically significant in short-term but no such effect exists in the long-run. We analyze the capital transfers, in form of...

Using monthly data from 1953 to 2003, we apply a real-time modeling approach to investigate the implications of U.S. political stock market anomalies for forecasting excess stock returns in real-time. Our empirical findings show that political variables, chosen on the basis of widely used...