Both prices and the volatility of storable agricultural commodity futures contracts have been rising since 2005 and particularly since 2007. This paper aims to answer two principal questions: (i) How has the behavior of these futures prices over time and across maturities changed with the rise...

This paper investigates whether the assumption of Brownian motion often used to describe commodity price movements is satisfied. Using historical data from 17 commodity futures contracts specific tests of fractional and ordinary Brownian motion are conducted. The analyses are conducted under the...

Purpose – Pricing densities implied from options on live cattle futures show a persistent and negative skew. The purpose is to examine whether the skew can be explained, in part, by peso-type problems. Design/methodology/approach –Two announcements of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)...

Commodity price volatility increased during 2006 to 2011 first with the commodity bull cycle of 2006 to 2008 and then with the credit freeze crisis and Great Recession. This letter uses both high- and low-frequency data over 1990 to 2011 to examine the link between economic fundamentals and...

Commodity futures have long been used to facilitate risk management and inventory stabilization. The study of commodity futures prices has attracted much attention in the literature because they are highly volatile and because commodities represent a large proportion of the export value in many...

Commodity cash and futures prices experienced a severe boom-and-bust cycle between 2006 and 2009. Increases in commodity price volatility have raised concerns about the usefulness of commodity futures and options as risk management tools. Dynamic hedging strategies have the potential to improve...

We investigate irreversible investment behavior under uncertainty of payoffs using U.S. firm-level panel data. We estimate the relationship between the firm’s investment to capital ratio and the interest rate, while controlling for investment opportunities, real option values, uncertainty and...

Economists who deal with time-series data usually take the unit root test as the ‘prerequisite’ test for a Brownian motion. It is typical for any researchers to apply a battery of well-known unit root tests to their models to confirm stationarity in the model specification. Nonetheless,...