This paper investigates the behaviour, from October 1999 to May 2001, of spreads on sovereign debt issuance from 15 countries located in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe using a homogeneous secondary market database. The research integrates standard Principal Components Analysis procedures...

The growing presence of financial operators in the oil market has brought about the diffusion of techniques - such as feedback trading - which lead to departures of prices from their fundamental values and increase their variability. Oil price changes are here associated with changes in stocks,...

This study introduces a non linear model for commodity futures prices which accounts for pressures due to hedging and speculative activities. The linkage with the corresponding spot market is considered assuming that a long term equilibrium relationship holds between futures and spot pricing....

Monthly data are used to investigate reserves management in eight Asian and Latin American countries. Idiosyncratic explanatory variables enter into co-integration relationships based on a stochastic buffer stock model, where a reserve variability measure is obtained via conditional variance...

The interaction between rational hedgers and informed oil traders is parameterized and tested empirically with the help of a complex non linear smooth transition regime shift CCC-GARCH procedure. In spite of their gyrations, futures price changes are usually self-correcting. Well informed...

The three exchange rate regimes adopted by Italy from 1883 up to the eve of World War I — the gold standard (1883-1893), floating rates (1894-1902), and “gold shadowing” (1903-1911) — produced a puzzling result: formal adherence to the gold standard ended in failure while shadowing the...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between commodity price volatility and market fundamentals comparing the 1920s with the present decade and focusing on cotton and tin. The theory of storage provides the theoretical reference for the analysis. Our first result is to find that the...