Informed speculators receive signals which are informative about future cash prices. Hedgers observe only the futures price. They attempt to infer the information content of the signals but only do so imperfectly because of the presence of noise traders. The consequence is that speculators bid...

Liberalization of tropical agricultural markets has brought globalization, in the sense that all producers now face world rather than domestic prices. Producer prices have tended to rise as a share of fob prices as intermediation costs and tax has declined. However, in conjunction with inelastic...

This paper revisits the extent of seasonality in African livelihoods. It uses 19 years of monthly food prices from 20 markets and three years of nationally representative household panel surveys from Tanzania. Trigonometric specifications are introduced to measure the seasonal gap. When samples...

Plenary presentation from 123rd EAAE Seminar, 23-24 February, Dublin, Ireland

The paper examines the impact of changes in the positions of financial actors on the volatilities of Chicago grains and vegetable oil prices using a GARCH-X framework within which a variant of Granger-causality tests can be performed. The paper analyses both the position data in the post-2006...

We use contemporaneous causality tests based on instrumental variables (IV) methods to re-examine causality from Commodity Index Trader positions to agricultural futures prices. A number of recent studies found that no Granger-causal impacts are discernible for agricultural commodity markets....

We consider the impact of the May 1999 move to screen trading of the LIFFE FTSE 100 index futures contract. This resulted in a narrowing of the effective spread. Spread determinants are broadly similar in the two regimes. The narrowing of the spread appears due to increased competition among...

We consider dynamic representation of spot and three month aluminium and copper volatilities. These are the two most important metals traded in the London Metal Exchange (LME). They share common business cycle factors and are traded under identical contract specifications. We apply the bivariate...