Several unique insights are documented based on a study of copper futures contracts traded in the U.S. and China. Based on our unique measures, we present evidence that the U.S. gold and silver futures markets reflect a fully arbitraged market and U.S. copper nearly so. In contrast, the Chinese...

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'...

Electricity is not storable. As a consequence, electricity demand and supply need to be in balance at any moment in time as a shortage in production volume cannot be compensated with supply from inventories. However, if the installed power supply capacity is very flexible, variation in demand...

Commodity derivatives were introduced in India with a dual purpose of promoting price discovery and enhancing risk management in the commodities market. A transaction tax (of 0.01 per cent) on commodity futures trading was introduced in the Union Budget 2013-14. This study examines the rationale...

Using futures data for the period 1990 - 2008, this paper finds evidence that expansionary monetary policy surprises tend to increase crude and heating oil prices, and contractionary monetary policy shocks increase gold and platinum prices. Our analysis uncovers substantial heterogeneity in the...

We develop a model of the illiquidity transmission from spot to futures markets that formalizes the derivative hedge theory proposed by Cho and Engle (1999). The model shows that spot market illiquidity does not translate one-to-one to the futures market, but rather interacts with price risk,...

In this study, we investigate the existence of long-term co-movements among the prices of commodity futures contracts. We use a cointegration test, which accounts for the presence of a structural break. We show that while there is a long-term relationship among agricultural and among...