We investigated causal factors driving German hog-price dynamics with an innovative ‘diagnostic’ modeling approach. Hog-price cycles are conventionally attributed to randomly-generated behavior best modeled stochastically—most recently as randomly-shifting sinusoidal oscillations....

This study explores the link between proximity and price cointegration between two markets, where proximity is captured with variables for geographical, political and cultural distance. Linear and threshold cointegration is tested for a set of 756 rice market pairs in 6 West African countries,...

Prices for nearly all basic commodity rose at unprecedented rates throughout early 2008, only to fall nearly as fast as financial markets and global economies began to collapse. Rising food prices in 2008 led to concerns that commodity price spikes would lead to more general food inflation, but...

The rise of price levels and volatility of world agricultural commodities since 2006-2008 was followed by increased and more volatile food price inflation around the world. Using error correction models, this paper evaluates the velocity and extent to which world agricultural commodity price...

In 2008, wheat futures prices spiked and then crashed along with prices for other agricultural and nonagricultural commodities. Market observers offered several theories to explain this common movement, or comovement, in prices, and have proposed policies to address the perceived problem of...

The instability of commodity prices and the hypothesis that speculative behaviour was one of its causes has brought renewed interest in futures markets. The paper analyses the European wheat futures markets (feed and milling) and the Chi- cago Board of Trade’s wheat contract as a...

Expectations about future economic conditions are important determinants of commodity prices. This paper presents a relatively simple model that makes futures prices for corn a function of expected production and inventories and of variables that account for demand shifts. The intent is to...

This paper investigates the effect of information flow on corn futures price variability for the period January 2004 -July 2011. The theoretical framework is the Mixture Distribution Hypothesis, that posits a joint dependence of return volatility and information. The main contribution of this...

The instability of prices and the hypothesis that speculative behaviour was one of its sources has brought renewed interest in the futures markets. In this paper, we concentrate on the European wheat futures markets (feed and milling) and the CBOT’s wheat contract as a comparison. The purpose...