Co-movement of major commodity price returns: A time-series assessment


Book Description

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the degree of co-movement among the nominal price returns of 11 major energy, agricultural, and food commodities using monthly data between 1970 and 2013. The authors study the extent and the time evolution of unconditional and conditional correlations using a uniform-spacings testing approach, a multivariate dynamic conditional correlation model and a rolling regression procedure.




Commodity Price Dynamics


Book Description

Commodities have become an important component of many investors' portfolios and the focus of much political controversy over the past decade. This book utilizes structural models to provide a better understanding of how commodities' prices behave and what drives them. It exploits differences across commodities and examines a variety of predictions of the models to identify where they work and where they fail. The findings of the analysis are useful to scholars, traders and policy makers who want to better understand often puzzling - and extreme - movements in the prices of commodities from aluminium to oil to soybeans to zinc.







The Internationalization of Equity Markets


Book Description

This timely volume addresses three important recent trends in the internationalization of United States equity markets: extensive market integration through foreign investment and links among stock prices around the world; increasing securitization as countries such as Japan come to rely more than ever before on markets in equities and bonds at the expense of banks; and the opening of national financial systems of newly industrializing countries to international financial flows and institutions, as governments remove capital controls and other barriers. Eight essays examine such issues as the current extent of international market integration, gains to U.S. investors through international diversification, home-country bias in investing, the role of time and location around the world in stock trading, and the behavior of country funds. Other, long-standing questions about equity markets are also addressed, including market efficiency and the accuracy of models of expected returns, with a particular focus on variances, covariances, and the price of risk according to the Capital Asset Pricing Model.




Food Price Volatility and Its Implications for Food Security and Policy


Book Description

This book provides fresh insights into concepts, methods and new research findings on the causes of excessive food price volatility. It also discusses the implications for food security and policy responses to mitigate excessive volatility. The approaches applied by the contributors range from on-the-ground surveys, to panel econometrics and innovative high-frequency time series analysis as well as computational economics methods. It offers policy analysts and decision-makers guidance on dealing with extreme volatility.




Co-Movement of Major Commodity Price Returns


Book Description

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the degree of co-movement among the nominal price returns of 11 major energy, agricultural and food commodities based on monthly data between 1970 and 2013. A uniform-spacings testing approach, a multivariate dynamic conditional correlation model and a rolling regression procedure are used to study the extent and the time-evolution of unconditional and conditional correlations. The results indicate that (i) the price returns of energy and agricultural commodities are highly correlated; (ii) the overall level of co-movement among commodities increased in recent years, especially between energy and agricultural commodities and in particular in the cases of maize and soybean oil, which are important inputs in the production of biofuels; and (iii) particularly after 2007, stock market volatility is positively associated with the co-movement of price returns across markets.




Additions to Market Indices and the Comovement of Stock Returns Around the World


Book Description

Using newly-constructed data covering the last decade, we document that, in most of forty markets, when added to the main index, firms’ returns experience an increase in comovement with the rest of the index, reflected in higher beta and greater explanatory power of the market return. Stock turnover and analyst coverage also typically increase upon inclusion. Using various tests, we find the demand-based view of comovement (the category/habitat theories of Barberis, Shleifer and Wurgler, 2005) to provide a good explanation for many of our findings. Some results, though, suggest that information-related factors are also important in explaining the increased comovement.




Commodities and Equities


Book Description

Amidst a sharp rise in commodity investing, many have asked whether commodities nowadays move in sync with traditional financial assets. The authors provide evidence that challenges this idea. Using dynamic correlation and recursive co-integration techniques, they found that the relation between the returns on investable commodity and U.S. equity indices has not changed significantly in the last fifteen years. The authors also find no evidence of any secular increase in co-movement between the returns on commodity and equity investments during periods of extreme returns.




Geopolitical Risk on Stock Returns: Evidence from Inter-Korea Geopolitics


Book Description

We investigate how corporate stock returns respond to geopolitical risk in the case of South Korea, which has experienced large and unpredictable geopolitical swings that originate from North Korea. To do so, a monthly index of geopolitical risk from North Korea (the GPRNK index) is constructed using automated keyword searches in South Korean media. The GPRNK index, designed to capture both upside and downside risk, corroborates that geopolitical risk sharply increases with the occurrence of nuclear tests, missile launches, or military confrontations, and decreases significantly around the times of summit meetings or multilateral talks. Using firm-level data, we find that heightened geopolitical risk reduces stock returns, and that the reductions in stock returns are greater especially for large firms, firms with a higher share of domestic investors, and for firms with a higher ratio of fixed assets to total assets. These results suggest that international portfolio diversification and investment irreversibility are important channels through which geopolitical risk affects stock returns.




Bayesian Multivariate Time Series Methods for Empirical Macroeconomics


Book Description

Bayesian Multivariate Time Series Methods for Empirical Macroeconomics provides a survey of the Bayesian methods used in modern empirical macroeconomics. These models have been developed to address the fact that most questions of interest to empirical macroeconomists involve several variables and must be addressed using multivariate time series methods. Many different multivariate time series models have been used in macroeconomics, but Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models have been among the most popular. Bayesian Multivariate Time Series Methods for Empirical Macroeconomics reviews and extends the Bayesian literature on VARs, TVP-VARs and TVP-FAVARs with a focus on the practitioner. The authors go beyond simply defining each model, but specify how to use them in practice, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each and offer tips on when and why each model can be used.