The recent financial crisis and the associated decline in economic activity have raised some important questions about economic activity and its links to the financial sector. This paper introduces an index of financial stress -- an index that was used in real time by the staff of the Federal...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of trading in the sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) market, using weekly data for single-name sovereign CDS from October 2008 to September 2015. We describe the anatomy of the sovereign CDS market, derive a law of motion for gross...

I examine the relative information roles among West Texas Intermediate spot crude price and four futures contracts (F1 through F4) with different maturities. Using a cointegrated system with a non-unitary cointegrating vector, I address price discovery by investigating which price is more...

The complexity of the world oil market has increased dramatically in recent years and new approaches are needed to understand, model, and forecast oil prices today. Many models have been explored and most of the papers and modeling projects referenced in this paper identify their own...

The present study attempts to analyze the price formation mechanism in the world soybean oil market in a competitive framework. The determinants of world soybean oil price are identified by estimating the equations for exports/imports and the border prices of the major exporting and importing...

This paper is an attempt to understand the price formation mechanism in world wheat markets and trace its likely implications for agricultural trade liberalization in India. The main objective is to identify the determinants of price formation and more specifically to understand the influence of...

The marketing and sales polices of Iranian crude oil have been revised and changed after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Production policy that drastically cut back production in order to maintain oil reserves for future generations. In terms of marketing Iranian crude oil, the new revolutionary...

Libor is arguably the world's most important number with more than USD 350 trillion of loans and financial contracts referencing this rate. Libor benchmark interest rates are being replaced with alternative reference rates (ARRs). There is no guarantee Libor rates will continue to be quoted...

Offshore assets present investors with an increased investment universe and additional opportunities for reward, but embedded exposure to exchange rates can result in additional risk. In this work, we consider a global equity portfolio of five equity indices (US, Japan, Europe, UK and Canada),...

We focus on the issue of currency management in the context of offshore investing with an emphasis on the selection of an appropriate currency hedge. It is shown that when seeking to minimize the risk associated with the Rand value of a foreign asset, the optimal currency hedge is strongly...