We derive stock returns for firms producing nonrenewable commodities by employing the investment-based asset pricing approach. By identifying the appropriate time-varying discount rate the investment-based approach allows an alternative test of the Hotelling Valuation Principle. The empirical...

This paper examines how speculative futures trading affects commodity markets in terms of price impacts, volatility, and market quality. Contrary to the popular belief that speculators are responsible for the recent commodity price fluctuation, my analysis finds no evidence that speculators...

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...

This paper provides some preliminary contributions to the debate over the sources of return in the commodity markets, based on work that is drawn from the 2007 Risk Book, Intelligent Commodity Investing. Essentially, Till (2007) and Feldman and Till (2006) find that in examining a 55-year period...

The futures curve of an aggregate commodity portfolio is time-varying and changes from upward (contango) to downward sloping (backwardation) which implies negative or positive expected returns. The basis arises as a natural fundamental to predict commodity returns. However, the empirical...

We report new evidence that speculation in energy and precious metal futures are more prevalent in crisis periods and even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, agricultural futures attract more hedging pressure. Post-GFC patterns mirror the 1980s’ recessions. Using quantile...

This paper examines the role of inventories in refiners' gasoline production and develops a structural model of the relationship between crude oil prices and inventories. Using data on inventories and prices of oil futures, I show that convenience yields decrease at a diminishing rate as...

We study the state-dependent trading behavior of financial intermediaries in the oil futures market, using structural vector autoregressions with Markov switching in heteroskedasticity. We decompose changes in futures price volatility into changes in the slopes of traders' demand curves and in...

This paper tests the impact of the commodity transaction tax (CTT) introduced in Indian commodity market since July 2013, particularly on market liquidity and volatility aspects. We rely on a distinctive design of the tax, which is imposed only on non agri-commodities. Here, we considered Gold...

We develop a model to study the impacts of speculative position limits in commodity futures market. In the spirit of Dodd-Frank Act, regulators believe that position limit on speculators would dampen futures price volatility and prevent market manipulation. We show that this is not true due to...