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Do traders in futures markets make use of all relevant information and is this reflected in prices? This collection of original essays by a team of international economists considers these and other questions central to futures markets

Do traders in futures markets make use of all relevant information and is this reflected in prices? This collection of original essays by a team of international economists considers these and other questions central to futures markets.

This book contains several innovative models for the prices of financial assets. First published in 1986, it is a classic text in the area of financial econometrics. It presents ARCH and stochastic volatility models that are often used and cited in academic research and are applied by quantitative analysts in many banks.

Key Features:Gives the first account of the major, empirical, stylized facts for financial asset returnsShows how innovative models for prices can be estimated and used to make forecastsContains pioneering contributions about the volatility of asset pricesProvides a summary of many recent results in the new Preface.

Despite their widespread use as predictors of the spot price of oil, oil futures prices tend to be less accurate in the mean-squared prediction error sense than no-change forecasts. This result is driven by the variability of the futures price about the spot price, as captured by the oil futures spread. This variability can be explained by the marginal convenience yield of oil inventories. Using a two-country, multi-period general equilibrium model of the spot and futures markets for crude oil we show that increased uncertainty about future oil supply shortfalls under plausible assumptions causes the spread to decline. Increased uncertainty also causes precautionary demand for oil to increase, resulting in an immediate increase in the real spot price. Thus the negative of the oil futures spread may be viewed as an indicator of fluctuations in the price of crude oil driven by precautionary demand. An empirical analysis of this indicator provides evidence of how shifts in the uncertainty about future oil supply shortfalls affect the real spot price of crude oil.

Carbon financial futures have both the characteristics of commodity futures and environmental protection and its price is affected by many factors. It is hard and complex for traditional analysis methods to get precise prediction results effectively. How to effectively predict the price trend of carbon financial futures has been focused on by both academia and traders. This study addresses the high prediction error of European allowance (EUA) futures price by constructing a novel approach by combining the support vector machine (SVM) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. This article introduces a parameters optimization method, which provides the best parameters for SVM to improve the prediction performance of the EUA futures price. Furthermore, this research uses the realistic trading dataset containing 30,762 EUA futures closing prices to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the PSO-SVM prediction model. The empirical results show that the prediction performance of the model, especially the radial kernel function, is significantly improved. And this approach can determine the parameters according to the characteristics of the dataset and input the parameters for training and prediction automatically. The PSO-SVM algorithm can effectively predict extreme price fluctuations and overcome the problem of high prediction error caused by parameter constraints.

Using prices from 182 cash markets from seven states and the Chicago Board of Trade futures, we investigate cointegration and price discovery for corn. Analysis based on cash–futures pairs reveals that cointegration holds for 52 cash markets and failures tend to happen farther away from futures delivery locations. Cash generally are as important as futures prices as information sources in the long run and cash to futures information flow is most likely in the short run. Contributions to price discovery also are measured quantitatively for cointegrated cases. Analysis based on state-level cash prices indicates bidirectional information flow between cash and futures prices under a bivariate model, and futures to cash information flow under the octavariate model with all cash and the futures series. Comparisons of the two models show that including local cash markets in a price relationship model highlights cointegration and the futures’ price discovery role and could benefit cash price forecasting. Finally, evidence of nonlinear causality is found.

We show that the compensation for rare events accounts for a large fraction of the average equity and variance risk premia. Exploiting the special structure of the jump tails and the pricing thereof, we identify and estimate a new Investor Fears index. The index reveals large time-varying compensation for fears of disasters. Our empirical investigations involve new extreme value theory approximations and high-frequency intraday data for estimating the expected jump tails under the statistical probability measure, and short maturity out-of-the-money options and new model-free implied variation measures for estimating the corresponding risk-neutral expectations.

Building on the GJR-GARCH model, this paper uses the mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) approach to link monthly realized volatility of EU carbon future prices and macroeconomic variables to the volatility of EU carbon futures market and proposes the GJR-GARCH-MIDAS model incorporating macroeconomic variables including the economic sentiment indicator of the EU, the harmonized index of consumer prices of the EU, the European economic policy uncertainty index and ECB’s marginal lending facility rate (GJR-GARCH-MIDAS-X models). An empirical analysis based on the monthly macroeconomic variables and daily EUA futures data shows that the above four low-frequency macroeconomic variables have significant positive or negative impacts on the long-term volatility of EUA future prices, respectively. The GJR-GARCH-MIDAS-X models significantly outperform other competing models, including the GJR-GARCH model, GARCH-MIDAS model and standard GJR-GARCH-MIDAS model, in terms of out-of-sample volatility forecasting, which suggests that macroeconomic variables contain important information for EUA future price volatility forecasts. In particular, the GJR-GARCH-MIDAS model with harmonized index of consumer prices (HICP) (GJR-GARCH-MIDAS-HICP model) performs best in out-of-sample volatility forecasting, and our findings are robust to different forecasting windows.

Can increased uncertainty about the future cause a contraction in output and its components? An identified uncertainty shock in the data causes significant declines in output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. Standard general-equilibrium models with flexible prices cannot reproduce this comovement. However, uncertainty shocks can easily generate comovement with countercyclical markups through sticky prices. Monetary policy plays a key role in offsetting the negative impact of uncertainty shocks during normal times. Higher uncertainty has even more negative effects if monetary policy can no longer perform its usual stabilizing function because of the zero lower bound. We calibrate our uncertainty shock process using fluctuations in implied stock market volatility, and show that the model with nominal price rigidity is consistent with empirical evidence from a structural vector autoregression. We argue that increased uncertainty about the future likely played a role in worsening the Great Recession. The economic mechanism we identify applies to a large set of shocks that change expectations of the future without changing current fundamentals.