This Paper, which extends earlier work by Filardo and Guinigundo (2008) and Nelson (2008), reports on a survey conducted in 2007 on the communication practices of 32 members of the Central Bank Governance Network. The questionnaire sent to Network members was divided into two main parts. The...

Economists and financial analysts have begun to recognise the importance of the actions of other agents in the decision-making process. Herding is the deliberate mimicking of the decisions of other agents. Examples of mimicry range from the choice of restaurant, fashion and financial market...

This paper investigates the relationship between futures prices and financial investments in derivatives of the main agricultural commodities. We first provide a broad picture of how these markets function and how they have evolved, showing that traders who deal mostly in commodity index...

We propose a model of volatility tail behavior, in which the pricing measure dominates the physical measure in both tails of the volatility distribution and, hence, the derived pricing kernel exhibits an increasing and decreasing region in the volatility dimension. The model features investors...

Exponential growth of credit default swaps market and the resulting pile of CDS contracts of notional value of $62 trillion by the end of 2007 as well as the OTC nature of the contracts are widely believed to be one of the main causes of the current crisis and its depth, because large volumes of...

We consider a canonical asset pricing model, where agents with quadratic preferences are allowed to retrade a limited set of securities over multiple periods, after which these securities expire, and agents consume their liquidation values. A key assumption in this model is that agents have...

This paper examines how speculative futures trading affects commodity markets in terms of price impacts, volatility, and market quality. Contrary to the popular belief that speculators are responsible for the recent commodity price fluctuation, my analysis finds no evidence that speculators...

Current financialization process involving commodity markets spurred controversial issues among policy-makers, practitioners and scholars about spillover effects on the price levels, and inherent consequences on the whole economy. In this debate, it is possible to distinguish between two basic...