As commodity markets have continued their expansion an extensive and complex financial industry has developed to service them. This industry includes hundreds of participating firms, including asset managers, brokers, consultants, verification agencies and a myriad of other institutions....

We use variance decompositions from high-dimensional vector autoregressions to characterize connectedness in 19 key commodity return volatilities, 2011-2016. We study both static (full-sample) and dynamic (rolling-sample) connectedness. We summarize and visualize the results using tools from...

Most institutional investors gain access to commodities through diversified index funds, even though mean-reverting prices and low correlation among commodities returns indicate that two-fund separation does not hold for commodities. In contrast to demand for stocks and bonds, we find that, on...

We propose and test a theory of using commodities as collateral for financing. Under capital control and collateral constraint, investors import commodities and pledge them as collateral to earn higher expected returns. Higher collateral demands increase commodity prices and make the inventory...