The addition of commodities to financial portfolios and resulting weight adjustments may create volatility linkages between commodity and financial markets, especially during financial crises. Also, biofuel mandates are suspected to integrate agricultural and energy markets. We calculate...

Presumed portfolio benefits of commodities and the availability of index fund-type investment products increase attractiveness of commodity markets for financial traders. But resulting “index trading” strategies are suspected to inflate commodity prices above their fundamental value. We use...

Satellite-detected luminosity is sometimes used to proxy for economic activity although only recently within the mainstream economics literature (Henderson et al., 2012). If this method works it holds great promise for developing countries with weak statistical systems that face difficulties in...

Using a comprehensive dataset covering most derivatives trades reported to US exchanges since 1954, we present distributional estimates of the rate at which derivative trading volumes rise and fall. Our results suggest that the lifecycle of cleared derivatives changed fundamentally in the...

The risk balancing literature suggests that business risk management (BRM) programs may, through risk balancing (offsetting adjustments between business risk and financial risk), lead farmers to take on more financial risk than they would take otherwise, which, in turn, increases the risk of...

This article analyzes the effects of conflict using a non-linear model and relies heavily on economic theory to define the relationship between conflict and profitability. This research builds on the model of Kretchmer and Puranam (2008), an effort-based model that captures the effects of...