The European Central Bank (ECB), as part of its forward-looking strategy, needs high-quality financial market statistical indicators as a means to facilitate evidence-based and sound decision-making. Such indicators include timely market intelligence and information to gauge investors'...

We decompose euro area sovereign bond yields into five distinct components: i) expected future short-term risk-free rates and a term premium, ii) default risk premium, iii) redenomination risk premium, iv) liquidity risk premium, and a v) segmentation (convenience) premium. Iden- tification is...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

This study examines a real case scenario using real data under the assumption of a long-term investment horizon. We examine the Dollar Cost Average, Cost Average Plan (CAP) in our case, and attempt to ascertain whether it could prove beneficial for an investor that does not have a significant...

We analyze the determinants of daily futures price volatility in corn, soybeans, wheat, and oats markets from 1986 to 2007. Combining the information from simultaneously traded contracts, we implement a generalized least squares method that allows us to clearly distinguish among time-to-delivery...

The European Union Trading Scheme (EU ETS) gives emission allowances a market price and are a marginal cost factor for those power plants that run on polluting fuels. Power plants have these costs in mind when they determine the selling price of their output. Being sold on a market place, it...

In this paper we discuss how our insight into the grounds of existence of futures markets has changed. We discuss futures market research within agricultural marketing, on the one hand, and within finance, on the other hand. The research within these two disciplines may be considered...

This paper is the first to discuss the design of futures hedging strategies in European natural gas markets (NBP, TTF and Zeebrugge). A common feature of energy prices is that conditional mean and volatility are driven by seasonal trends due to weather, demand, and storage level seasonalities....

The article presents the main features of one category of innovative financial products – exchange traded commodities (ETCs) and results of the analysis of the European market for ETCs. ETCs are products listed and traded on the stock exchanges and they offer investors returns based on various...

This paper is the first to discuss the design of futures hedging strategies in European natural gas markets (NBP, TTF and Zeebrugge). A common feature of energy prices is that conditional mean and volatility are driven by seasonal trends due to weather, demand, and storage level seasonalities....