This paper develops a model to analyze information aggregation in commodity markets. Through centralized trading, commodity prices aggregate dispersed information about the strength of the global economy among goods producers whose production has complementarity, and serve as price signals to...

We analyze the variance risk of commodity markets. We construct synthetic variance swaps and find significantly negative realized and expected variance swap payoffs in most markets. We find evidence of commonalities among the realized payoffs of commodity variance swaps. We also document...

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...

Agents who acknowledge that their models are incorrectly specified are said to be ambiguity averse, and this affects the prices they are willing to trade at. Models for prices of commodities attempt to capture three stylized features: seasonal trend, moderate deviations (a diffusive factor), and...

Using the Tsay (1988) outlier identification methodology on daily log-returns of 16 commodity spot price series and 25 commodity index series, this study assesses the impact significant and unexpected news announcements had on volatility between January 1, 1997 and December 31, 2007. Results...