Motivated by repeated price spikes and crashes over the last decade, we investigate whether the rapidly growing market shares of futures speculators have destabilized commodity spot prices. We approximate conditional volatility and regress it on expected and unexpected speculative open interest....

Short-term forecasting is usually made in recent literature by modeling the spot price of commodities such as coffee and cattle with ARIMA models and in some articles including volatility models. Unlike such articles, herein the models of the spot price of coffee and cattle are estimated...

We consider a market model that consists of financial investors and producers of a commodity. Producers optionally store some production for future sale and go short on forward contracts to hedge the uncertainty of the future commodity price. Financial investors take positions in these contracts...

The large inflow of investment capital to commodity futures markets in the past decade has generated a heated debate about whether financialization distorts commodity prices. Rather than focusing on the opposing views concerning whether investment flows caused a price bubble, we critically...