This paper examines whether the proliferation of new index products, such as commodity-tracking exchange-traded funds (ETFs), amplified the volatility transmission channel introduced by financialization. This paper focuses on the volatility spillover effects among crude oil, metals, agriculture,...

We study the returns to a simple trend following strategy in commodity futures markets and their drivers. Returns correlate positively to calendar spread liquidity and constraints on intermediation capital. The strategy delivers low annualized excess returns in the period from 1990 to 2004 of...

Financialization of commodity markets has been a broadly discussed topic in recent years. However, its implications for commodity investors have not yet been fully explored. This paper concentrates on the macroeconomic determinants of commodity returns in financialized and non-financialized...

This paper studies the effects of financial speculation on commodity futures returns, using publicly available data from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, aggregated by trader groups. We exploit the heteroskedasticity in the weekly data to identify exogenous variation in speculators'...

This paper examines the impact of the public's expectation of a political event on global financial markets. Using the setting of the UK referendum on EU membership, we show that an increase in the likelihood of Brexit led to lower stock prices and higher market implied volatility. Furthermore,...

This paper surveys the literature that deals with the informational content of market option prices for the purposes of quantitative asset management. We review studies that have investigated whether market option prices may help a portfolio manager in the stock selection process, portfolio...

In this paper, we present a novel method to extract the risk-neutral probability of default of a firm from American put option prices. Building on the idea of a default corridor proposed in Carr and Wu (2011), we derive a parsimonious closed-form formula for American put option prices from which...

Using a range of stochastic volatility models well-known in the nance literature, we study the existence of money market bubbles in the US economy. Money market bubbles preclude the existence of a risk-neutral pricing measure. Understanding whether markets exhibit money market bubbles is crucial...

The present paper provides empirical studies to estimate defaultable bonds in the South African financial market. The main goal is to estimate the unobservable factors affecting bond yields for South African major banks. The maximum likelihood approach is adopted for the estimation methodology....

We measure investors' short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. While contemporaneous short-term...