can financial intermediation induce endogenous fluctuations abstract this paper studies the possibility of endogenous fluctuations caused by activities of financial intermediaries risk averse agents borrow from banks and invest in a risky two state capital technology the probability of success with the technology is assumed to be decreasing in the amount of capital invested in a complete information setting with intermediation the efficient loan contract achieves complete risk sharing but the amount invested in the risky project is smaller than the loan size this income effect is responsible for the endogenous generation of complex dynamics in the absence of intermediation the economy studied cannot exhibit any cyclical fluctuations

global dynamics in a model with search and matching in labor and capital markets abstract in this paper global macroeconomic dynamics are studied when search frictions are present in both labor and capital markets on the basis of the merz 1995 macroeconomic model with labor market frictions and capital accumulation our paper offers an extension to frictions in capital markets analogously modeled as a search and matching process using the merz model as limit case we consider exogenous as well as endogenous borrowing constraints we also allow the cost of issuing bonds to change endogenously as we show capital market frictions exacerbate and accentuate the interaction between the two markets and magnify the effects of shocks on output consumption employment and welfare this interaction of the frictions in labor and capital markets are also shown to give rise to multiple equilibria on the basis of numerical solution techniques instead of relying on first or second order approximations around a unique steady state our paper uses dynamic programming techniques to compute decision variables and the value function directly and assess the local and global dynamics of the model the steady state solutions are studied by using the hamiltonian and the dynamics are assessed for various model variants by using dynamic programming techniques

money and contracts this paper presents a novel interpretation of the fact that high nominal interest rates accompany low levels of real gnp it constructs a model in which money and bonds are both held as a result of legal restrictions on the banking system open market operations may increase the equilibrium rate of interest and raise the cost of credit this increase in the cost of credit causes firms to write labour contracts in which layoffs occur more frequently the nature of optimal labour contracts is derived explicitly from assumptions about the information that is available to firms and to workers

financial collapse a lesson from the great depression abstract we analyze financial collapses such as the one that occurred during the u s great depression from the perspective of a monetary model with multiple equilibria the multiplicity arises from the presence of a strategic complementarity due to increasing returns to scale in the intermediation process intermediaries provide the link between savers and firms who require working capital for production fluctuations in the intermediation process are driven by variations in the confidence agents place in the financial system from a positive perspective our model matches quite closely the qualitative changes in important financial and real variables the currency deposit ratio ex post real interest rates deflation and production over the great depression period an experience often attributed to financial collapse further we assess whether the policy prescription advocated by friedman and schwartz adding liquidity to the banking system through increases in the money supply would have overcome strategic uncertainty and thus avoided a financial collapse

risk spillovers between oil and stock markets a var for var analysis abstract this article investigates the risk spillover effect between oil and stock markets using a novel multivariate quantile model i e the var for var approach and pseudo impulse response functions we explore the risk spillover at different quantiles using daily data over the period from january 4 2000 through august 31 2018 our results indicate the asymmetry in spillover effect which is significant at upside quantiles but not significant at downside quantiles based on subsample analysis we find that the risk spillover becomes stronger after 2008 financial crisis while before the crisis the spillover effect is very weak the international evidence shows that the asymmetric risk spillover can also be found in other six major stock indices of the g7 group

uncertainty shocks and firm creation search and monitoring in the credit market abstract we develop a business cycle model where endogenous firm creation stems from two credit market frictions first entrepreneurs search for a lending relationship with a bank second an optimal debt contract with monitoring is implemented we analyze the interplay between both frictions and embed it into an otherwise standard business cycle model which we estimate with bayesian techniques we find that uncertainty shocks are a prime contributor to business cycle fluctuations in the us not only for macro financial aggregates but also for firm creation moreover we point out that the credit search friction dampens the financial accelerator mechanism because default may imply the end of the lending relationship

price setting supergames with capacity constraints this paper examines the role of industry capacity in enforcing collusion in the context of repeated games for a fixed capacity per firm it is shown that changes in the number of firms have a non monotone effect on the best enforceable cartel price this is due to the fact that while an additional firm lowers the share that each of the other firms enjoys at the collusive price it also increases the losses to each firm should the cartel fail

liquidity flows and fragility of business enterprises abstract this paper develops a macroeconomic model in which funds are channeled to entrepreneurs through long term relationships between entrepreneurs and lenders the flow of funds to a relationship may be low causing it to break up due to insufficient liquidity multiple pareto ranked steady states emerge from complementarity between financial intermediation reflected by the number of relationships and households incentives to provide funds this complementarity also serves as a mechanism for propagating aggregate shocks financial collapse may become inescapable if a shock destroys sufficiently many relationships

job destruction and propagation of shocks this paper considers propagation of aggregate shocks in a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor market matching and endogenous job destruction cyclical fluctuations in the job destruction rate magnify the output effects of shocks as well as making them much more persistent interactions between capital adjustment and the job destruction rate play an important role in generating persistence propagation effects are shown to be quantitatively substantial when the model is calibrated using job flow data incorporating costly capital adjustment leads to significantly greater propagation

aggregate consequences of limited contract enforceability we study a general equilibrium model in which entrepreneurs finance investment with optimal financial contracts because of enforceability problems contracts are constrained efficient we show that limited enforceability amplifies the impact of technological innovations on aggregate output this implies that economies with lower enforceability of contracts are characterized by greater macroeconomic volatility a key assumption for the amplification result is that defaulting entrepreneurs are not excluded from the market

credit mismatch and breakdown abstract this paper studies the phenomenon of mismatch in a decentralized credit market where borrowers and lenders must engage in costly search to establish credit relationships our dynamic general equilibrium framework integrates incentive based informational frictions with a matching process highlighted by i borrowers endogenous market entry and exit decision entry frictions and ii time and resource costs necessary to locate credit opportunities search frictions a key feature of the incentive compatible loan contract negotiated between borrowers and lenders is the interaction of informational frictions in the form of moral hazard with entry and search frictions we find that the removal of entry barriers can eliminate incentive based equilibrium credit rationing more generally entry and incentive frictions are important in understanding the extent of credit rationing and credit mismatch while search and incentive frictions are important for understanding credit market breakdown

search frictions credit market liquidity and net interest margin cyclicality the present paper contributes to the body of knowledge on search frictions in credit markets by demonstrating their ability to explain why the net interest margins of banks behave countercyclically during periods of expansion a fall in the net interest margin proceeds from two mechanisms i lenders accept that they must finance entrepreneurs that have lower productivity and ii the liquidity of the credit market rises which simplifies access to loans for entrepreneurs and thereby reinforces their threat point when bargaining the interest rate of the loan

have commodities become a financial asset evidence from ten years of financialization the financialization of commodity markets over the last decade has changed the behavior of commodity prices in fundamental ways in this paper we uncover the gradual transformation of commodities from a physical to a financial asset although economic demand and supply factors continue to play an important role recent indicators associated with financialization have emerged since 2008 we show that financial variables have become the main driving factors explaining the variation in commodity returns and volatility today our findings have important implications for portfolio analysis and for the effectiveness of hedging in commodity markets

the international transmission of financial shocks the case of japan one of the more dramatic financial events of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the surge in japanese stock prices that was immediately followed by a very sharp decline of more than 50 percent while the unprecedented fluctuations in japanese stock prices were domestic financial shocks the unique institutional characteristics of the japanese economy produce a framework that is particularly suited to the transmission of such shocks to other countries through the behavior of the japanese banking system the large size of japanese bank lending operations in the united states enables us to use u s banking data to investigate the extent to which this domestic japanese financial shock was transmitted to the united states as well as to identify a supply shock to u s bank lending that is independent of u s loan demand we find that binding risk based capital requirements associated with the decline in the japanese stock market resulted in a decline in commercial lending by japanese banks in the united states that was both economically and statistically significant this finding has added importance given the severe real estate loan problems currently faced by japanese banks how japanese bank regulators decide to resolve these problems will have significant implications for credit availability in the united states as well as in other countries with a significant japanese bank presence

search financial market frictions and monetary transmission this paper evaluates the implications of search and matching frictions in the financial market for the bank lending channel of monetary policy borrowers and lenders participate in a decentralized loan market for the purpose of establishing long term credit relationships and the provision of loanable funds to productive firms locating credit relationships is costly in terms of time and real resources and the interest rate is negotiated via a bargaining mechanism this structure is incorporated into an otherwise standard monetary business cycle framework and used to study how such frictions in the credit market contribute to explaining the contemporaneous impact and propagation of monetary growth shocks and inflation while anticipated inflation negatively impacts real activity it can also increase loan market participation and the inflow of newly established credit relationships it is shown that i bargaining and costly search mitigates the traditional inflation tax effect of monetary injections and ii the existence of long term lending relations tends to dampen liquidity effects monetary shocks in this environment lead to larger liquidity effects relative to the frictionless case and are capable of generating persistence in the nominal interest rate labor consumption and output it can also explain the excess volatility of credit creation relative to output and the observation that overall credit creation can lead output over the business cycle

rational expectations risk and efficiency in the london metal exchange an empirical analysis there now exists a number of studies which reject efficiency of the london metal exchange as a joint null hypothesis of rational expectations and risk neutrality in this paper we investigate the presence of time varying risk premia in a number of metal price series conditional on the assumption of rationality our findings include evidence to suggest that forward prices contain information on future spot prices over and above the information contained in current spot prices that there is some evidence of time varying premia in the forward prices for tin and zinc and that the behaviour of these premia are intuitively plausible in particular there appears to be significant covariation between risk premia and the expected spot price change

speculative bubbles in recent oil price dynamics evidence from a bayesian markov switching state space approach abstract motivated by repeated spikes and crashes during previous decades we investigate whether the heavily financialized market for crude oil has been driven by speculative bubbles in our theoretical modeling we draw on the convenience yield approach in order to approximate the fundamental value of the oil price we separate the oil price fundamental from the bubble component by expressing a standard present value oil price model in state space form we then introduce two markov regimes into the state space representation in order to distinguish between two distinct phases in the bubble process namely one in which the oil price bubble is a stable process and one in which the bubble explodes we estimate the entire markov switching state space specification using an econometrically robust bayesian markov chain monte carlo mcmc methodology based on inferential techniques designed for statistically separating both markov regimes in the bubble process from each other we find robust evidence for the existence of speculative bubbles in recent oil price dynamics

the dynamics of a nonlinear relationship between crude oil spot and futures prices a multivariate threshold regression approach abstract this paper segments daily data from january of 1986 to april of 2007 into three periods based on certain important events both periods i and ii indicate that the spot prices in general are higher than futures prices as was well known in the literature only period iii 2001 9 11 2007 4 30 displays a reverse phenomenon futures prices in general exceed spot prices when the absolute value of a basis futures spot is greater than the threshold value in the arbitrage area regime 1 and 3 at least one of the error correction coefficients representing adjustment towards equilibrium is statistically significant that is there exists a tendency in the oil market in which prices move toward equilibrium with respect to the short run dynamic interaction between spot price change st and futures price change ft our results indicate that when the spot price is higher than futures price and the basis is less than certain threshold value regime 3 there exists at least one causal relationship between st and ft conversely when the futures price is higher than spot price and the basis is higher than certain threshold value regime 1 there exists at least one causal relationship between st and ft finally we use the method suggested by diebold and mariano diebold francis x mariano roberto s 1995 comparing predictive accuracy journal of business and economic statistics 13 3 253 263 to compare the predictive power between the linear and nonlinear models our empirical results indicate that the in sample prediction of the nonlinear model is clearly superior to that of the linear model

gross loan flows we present a series of stylized facts about gross loan flows and how they vary over time bank size and region we define loan creation as the sum of the change in bank loans at all banks that increased loans since last quarter loan destruction is similarly defined as the absolute value of the change in loans at all banks that decreased loans the gross flow akin to what the labor literature calls reallocation is the sum of creation and destruction

bertrand competition for inputs and walrasian outcomes market making by merchants who obtain stock from suppliers and resell it to con sumers is modeled as a two stage pricing game with winner take all c ompetition for the inputs in contrast to fixed capacity models the re is a unique subgame perfect nash equilibrium spne which is walr asian for elastic demand and non walrasian for inelastic demand alte rnatively when merchants first sell forward contracts to consumers a nd then compete for supplies the unique spne is always walrasian th us the author has an equilibrium model in which walrasian price aris es not from the benevolent actions of a fictitious auctioneer but fr om optimal price setting behavior of merchants copyright 1988 by american economic association

nonlinear dynamics and stock returns simple deterministic systems are capable of generating chaotic output that mimics the output of stochastic systems for this reason algorithms have been developed to distinguish between these two alternatives these algorithms and related statistical tests are also useful in detecting the presence of nonlinear dependence in time series in this article the authors apply these procedures to stock returns and find evidence that indicates the presence of nonlinear dependence on weekly returns from the center for research in security prices value weighted index copyright 1989 by the university of chicago

rational expectations and risk premia in forward markets primary metals at the london metals exchange this paper tests whether forward prices equal the traders expectations of the future spot prices at maturity under two different models of expectations formation full information rational expectations and incomplete information mechanical forecasting rule the tests are performed over the period january 1970 through september 1980 on the forward markets for the primary metals copper tin lead and zinc traded in the london metals exchange we find evidence consistent with the existence of time varying risk premia the way in which traders form expectations about future price is of great interest to economists as well as to market participants and forward prices have often been used as indicators of these otherwise unobservable expectations forward prices however include not only the expectation of future spot prices but also a component reflecting the riskiness of the contract therefore the risk premium can be defined as the difference between the forward price and the expected future spot at the maturity date of the forward contract there is a longstanding debate on the nature of this risk premium the hickskeynes view2 is that in futures markets speculators provide insurance against the risk of fluctuations in the price of the spot commodity and hedgers pay a premium for this risk transfer in the way of a forward price that is higher than the expected spot price in other words the risk premium should be positive 3 hardy 11 has suggested however that a future market is merely a casino in which speculators can participate in a legalized form of gambling for this privilege they have to pay a price in the form of a negative expected return thus resulting in a negative risk premium 4

energy sector pricing on the role of neglected nonlinearity modern economies have been subjected to a number of shocks during the past several years such as the burst of the internet bubble terrorist attacks corporate scandals the war in iraq the uncertainty about energy prices and the recent subprime mortgage crisis in particular during the last few years the energy shock has caused concerns for potential stagflation for both the united states and numerous other countries we perform numerous univariate tests for non linearity and chaotic structure using price data from the energy sector to resolve whether the sector s fundamentals or exogenous shocks drive these prices

does the s p500 index lead the crude oil dynamics a complexity based approach abstract taking the complex property of nonlinear feedback connectivity into consideration the goal of this paper is to apprehend the interdependences between the financial and energy sectors our contribution is both theoretical and methodological we conduct a multivariate analysis employing nonlinear tools namely the partial transfer entropy and the asymmetric mackey glass causality test in particular we build a system comprising the petroleum complex crude oil gasoline and heating oil the s p500 index and the 1 month futures spot spread for crude oil by adopting a rolling window approach we observe a persistent lead lag relationship between the s p500 index and the market participants expectations for crude oil from 2004 to 2009 depending on the bubble period in the stock market it appears that the resulting coupling becomes subject to the deterioration of global economic activity induced by large common shocks

bank capital firm liquidity and project quality abstract we construct an economy where a two way interaction between bank capital and project quality propagates negative shocks to technology or regulation by shrinking the available liquidity and the scale of their activity a contraction in bank loans discourages entrepreneurs from sustaining the set up effort of high quality projects inducing them to shift to low quality ones the deterioration in project quality erodes the value of bank assets and hence banks capitalization and loanable funds lack of information in the secondary market for bank assets amplifies the propagation

oil prices and the impact of the financial crisis of 2007 2009 abstract oil prices increased dramatically during 2004 2006 industry experts initially attributed these price increases to fundamental factors such as the rise in global demand but also because of disruptions in the supply of oil the price increases however were so substantial that additional factors are needed to explain such dramatic changes we propose that the decline in the value of the u s dollar measured both by the appreciation of the euro and of gold prices played an important role as oil suppliers demanded compensation for the declining value of the dollar using a markov switching regime methodology we find evidence that this hypothesis is true prior to the financial crisis but its validity does not hold after the crisis when oil prices crashed and the dollar rallied

price competition in a capacity constrained duopoly abstract this paper characterizes the set of nash equilibria in a model of price setting duopoly in which each firm has limited capacity and demand is continuous and decreasing in general there is a unique equilibrium so that comparative static exercises are meaningful the properties of the equilibrium conform with a number of stylized facts the equilibrium prices are lower the smaller is demand relative to capacity when demand is in an intermediate range the firms use mixed strategies they randomly hold sales if capacities are chosen simultaneously before prices the set of equilibrium capacities coincides with the set of cournot quantities

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

gross credit flows the paper estimates gross credit flows for the u s banking system between 1979 and 1999 and shows that sizable gross flows coexist at any phase of the cycle even within narrowly defined loan categories bank size categories and regional units to investigate the macroeconomic dimensions of gross credit flows the paper studies the cyclical behavior of aggregate credit flows and documents three key cyclical facts first excess credit reallocation is countercyclical for any given rate of change of net credit gross flows are larger in a recession than in a boom second gross credit flows are highly volatile with a cyclical volatility which appears more than an order of magnitude larger than gdp volatility third credit contraction is more volatile than credit expansion furthermore the behavior of gross flows over the 1991 recession suggests that persistent and historically high credit contraction is a key feature of the relatively mild cyclical downturn the results lends some support to aggregate models that emphasize the asymmetric behavior of credit expansion and credit contractions

the efficiency of the london metal exchange another look at the evidence recent evidence suggests that some markets on the london metal exchange do not exhibit the major characteristics of efficient markets rationality and risk neutrality in this note we ilustrate several shortcomings of recent work in this area we suggest that one can be confident that the tin market exhibited a risk premium that is was inefficient between 1976 and 1985 reliable results on the efficiency of the lead copper aluminium and nickel markets escape the fama approach to testing the efficient markets hypothesis as it is currently employed

home equity mobility and macroeconomic fluctuations how does a fall in house prices affect real activity this paper presents a business cycle model in which a decline in house prices reduces geographical mobility creating distortions in the labor market this happens because homeowners face declines in their home equity levels after which it becomes more difficult to provide the down payment required for a new mortgage loan unemployed homeowners therefore turn down job offers that would require them to move the model explains joint cyclical patterns in housing and labor market aggregates as well as the puzzling breakdown of the u s beveridge curve that occurred during 2009

the macroeconomics of labor and credit market imperfections labour market frictions are not the only possible source of high unemployment credit market imperfections driven by microeconomic frictions and influenced by macroeconomic factors could also be to blame to develop this idea in a simple and tractable macroeconomic model we treat credit and labour market imperfections in a symmetrical way accordingly we introduce specificity in credit relationships and assume that credit to potential entrepreneurs is rationed due to endogenous search frictions in the spirit of diamond 1990 these imperfections mirror job search frictions in the labour market we study the determination of equilibrium unemployment in the presence of credit market frictions both with exogenous and endogenous wages we explore a number of possible extensions endogenous destruction monetary policy and the short run effects of financial liberalization

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games i theory the article presents information about the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games in this paper and its sequel presents study the existence of nash equilibrium in games where agents payoff functions are discontinuous the enquiry is motivated by a number of recent studies that have uncovered serious existence problems in seemingly innocuous economic games in the sequel to this paper authors have explained the utility function in the economic games referred to earlier are neither continuous nor quasi concave however they demonstrate that the payoff functions in mildly modified versions of these constructs exhibit two weaker forms of continuity which together with the requirement of quasi concavity suffice for the existence of an equilibrium from this one may conclude that at least in the modified versions of these models discontinuities in the payoff functions are not the real source of the problem rather it is the failure of the payoff functions to the quasi concave which is responsible for the non existence of equilibrium these observations bear on the existence of nash equilibrium in pure strategies

the existence of mixed strategy equilibria in a price setting oligopoly with convex costs this paper shows that a mixed strategy equilibrium will exist in an industry producing a homogeneous product with perfectly informed consumers if firms are identical and have weakly convex costs this generalises an earlier result by dasgupta and maskin

what is a liquidity crisis abstract this paper investigates the role of liquidity it is argued that the firm holds money as a guarantee of solvency to its contractual partners by holding liquid assets the firm is able to increase the efficiency of its contracts variations in the opportunity cost of holding money cause variations in the firm s demand for money and consequent variations in the frequency of contract failures this mechanism is suggested as an alternative explanation of the observed relationship between money income and interest rates

heterogeneous borrowers liquidity and the search for credit abstract we develop a general equilibrium model of credit formation where borrowers and lenders must search for matches and where the composition of borrowers adjusts to satisfy equilibrium entry conditions when market liquidity dries up as a result of fundamental shocks to the system fewer borrowers will participate in the credit market with low quality borrowers suffering disproportionately because of a flight to quality however less liquid credit markets need not be associated with lower social output because the effect of higher average quality may outweigh that of reduced market participation depending crucially on the source of the liquidity shock

oil prices speculation and fundamentals interpreting causal relations among spot and futures prices abstract a consensus that the world oil market is unified begs the question where do innovations in oil prices enter the market here we investigate where changes in the price of crude oil originate and how they spread by examining causal relationships among prices for crude oils from north america europe africa and the middle east on both spot and futures markets results indicate that innovations first appear in spot prices for dubai fateh and spread to other spot and futures prices while other innovations first appear in the far month contract for west texas intermediate and spread to other exchanges and contracts links between spot and futures markets are relatively weak and this may have allowed the long run relationship between spot and future prices to change after september 2004 together these results suggest that market fundamentals initiated a long term increase in oil prices that was exacerbated by speculators who recognized an increase in the probability that oil prices would rise over time

foreign banks and the dual effect of financial liberalization in emerging countries credit market liberalization is often motivated with the financial deepening generated by the entry of foreign financial institutions however there is a risk that liberalization may benefit internationally active export oriented businesses at the expense of domestically oriented ones this paper models a two sector economy in which foreign lenders are more efficient than local lenders at extracting value from internationally tradable collateral assets under some conditions the entry of foreign lenders eases entrepreneurs access to the credit market and raises asset prices and output but in other circumstances it reduces the depth of the credit market and depresses the price of nontradables and output liberalization can have a contractionary impact by inducing a reallocation of credit from the nontradables to the tradables sector

price setting merchants in a simple trade model abstract in lieu of a fictitious walrasian auctioneer price determination in a simple two country two good trade model is explicitly modelled as the strategic price setting behavior of merchants the results depend on the order in which countries are visited and whether or not the supply is backward bending theorem 1 establishes sufficient conditions for the walrasian outcome to be the unique subgame perfect nash equilibrium spne theorem 2 shows when the unique spne is non walrasian

oil shocks and stock volatility new evidence via a bayesian graph based var approach abstractthis article examines the temporal dependence between three oil shocks and realized volatility in the stock markets of g20 countries between 1994 and 2019 by applying a novel graphical b

cointegration and detectable linear and nonlinear causality analysis using the london metal exchange lead contract this study applies linear and nonlinear granger causality tests to examine the dynamic relation between london metal exchange lme cash prices and three possible predictors the analysis uses matched quarterly inventory uk treasury bill interest rates futures prices and cash prices for the commodity lead traded on the lme the effects of cointegration on both linear and nonlinear granger causality tests is also examined when cointegration is not modelled evidence is found of both linear and nonlinear causality between cash prices and analysed predictor variables however after controlling for cointegration evidence of significant nonlinear causality is no longer found these results contribute to the empirical literature on commodity price forecasting by highlighting the relationship between cointegration and detectable linear and nonlinear causality the importance of interest rate and inventory as well as futures price in forecasting cash prices is also illustrated failure to detect significant

on the profitability and cost of relationship lending abstract we provide evidence on the costs and profitability of relationship lending by banks we derive bank specific measures of loan rate smoothing for small business borrowers in response to exogenous shocks to their credit risk and to interest rates and then estimate cost and profit functions to examine how smoothing affects bank costs and profits our results suggests that in general loan rate smoothing in response to a credit risk shock is not part of an optimal long term contract between a bank and its borrower while loan rate smoothing in response to an interest rate shock is

speculative trading and oil price dynamic a study of the wti market abstract the aim of this paper is to study the oil price dynamic in west texas intermediate wti market in the us by using statistical and econometric tools we first attempt to identify the long term relationship between wti spot prices and the prices of futures contracts on the new york mercantile exchange nymex subsequently we model the short term dynamic between these two prices and this analysis points up several breaks on this basis a short term markov switching vectorial error correction model ms vecm with two distinct states standard state and crisis state has been estimated finally we introduce the volumes of transactions observed on the nymex for the wti contracts and we estimate the influence of the non commercial players we conclude that the hypothesis of an influence of non commercial players on the probability for being in the crisis state cannot be rejected in addition we show that the rise in liquidity of the first financial contracts as measured by the volume of open interest is a key element to understand the dynamics in market prices

dynamic duopoly prices and quantities we study a dynamic model of duopoly in which firms choose both prices and quantities if quantity capacity choices are relatively inflexible firms generally carry excess idle capacity in equilibrium because of this enforcement cost firms are unable to achieve monopoly levels this contrasts with models in which which firms compete in either prices or quantities alone on the other hand if capacities are flexible firms may be able to sustain monopoly behaviour

mean reversion in equilibrium asset prices evidence from the futures term structure we use the term structure of futures prices to test whether investors anticipate mean reversion in spot asset prices the empirical results indicate mean reversion in each market we examine for agricultural commodities and crude oil the magnitude of the estimated mean reversion is large for example point estimates indicate that 44 percent of a typical spot oil price shock is expected to be reversed over the subsequent eight months for metals the degree of mean reversion is substantially less but still statistically significant we detect only weak evidence of mean reversion in financial asset prices in this study we provide evidence of mean reversion in the prices of several real and financial assets rather than examining evidence of ex post reversion using time series of asset prices we use price data from futures contracts with varying delivery horizons to test whether investors expect asset prices to revert this approach offers two advantages first since futures prices are readily available for many markets our procedure can be implemented for many assets including those for which reliable spot price data is elusive second there is little ambiguity as to the source of any mean reversion detected using our method subject only to the maintained assumption that the no arbitrage cost of carry condition holds our test detects mean reversion that is expected to occur in equilibrium but has no power to detect mean reversion resulting from noise or inefficiencies our methodology focuses on relations between price levels and the slope of the futures term structure defined as the change across delivery dates in the futures prices observed on a given trading date an inverse relation between prices and the futures term slope constitutes evidence that investors expect mean reversion in spot prices to illustrate initially assume there are no

crude oil commodity or financial asset abstract we examine the relation among daily returns to crude oil prices equity prices and commodity markets by modifying previous efforts in two important ways expanding the model to include the equity price for an oil producing firm conocophillips which ameliorates omitted variable bias and estimating the expanded model using the kalman filter which reduces uncertainty associated with ols estimates from rolling windows consistent with the notion of a commodity price beta for oil industry stocks there is a positive correlation between returns to the spot price of wti and conocophillips this correlation indicates not all price changes in crude oil are expected to persist indeed some of the price reductions associated with the asian financial crisis and the price increase associated with the 2008 price spike are not included in our estimate for long run prices in 2008 q4 the correlations between daily returns to crude oil and equities flip from negative to positive we hypothesize that this flip is triggered by a large reduction in interest rates in the fourth quarter of 2008 which is associated with a reduction in convenience yields and a change from backwardation to contango in futures markets these changes increase the returns to holding crude oil as a financial asset relative to holding oil as a commodity

corporate structure liquidity and investment evidence from japanese industrial groups this paper presents evidence suggesting that information and incentive problems in the capital market affect investment we come to this conclusion by examining two sets of japanese firms the first set has close financial ties to large japanese banks that serve as their primary source of external finance and are likely to be well informed about the firm the second set of firms has weaker links to a main bank and presumably faces greater problems raising capital investment is more sensitive to liquidity for the second set of firms than for the first set the analysis also highlights the role of financial intermediaries in the investment process

oil price dynamics and speculation a multivariate financial approach abstract this paper assesses empirically whether speculation affects oil price dynamics the growing presence of financial operators in the oil markets has led to the diffusion of trading techniques based on extrapolative expectations strategies of this kind foster feedback trading that may cause considerable departures of prices from their fundamental values we investigate this hypothesis using a modified capm following shiller 1984 and sentana and wadhwani 1992 first a univariate garch 1 1 m is estimated assuming the risk premium to be a function of the conditional oil price volatility the single factor model however is outperformed by the multifactor icapm merton 1973 which takes into account a larger investment opportunity set analysis is then carried out using a trivariate ccc garch m model with complex nonlinear conditional mean equations where oil price dynamics are associated with both stock market and exchange rate behavior we find strong evidence that oil price shifts are negatively related to stock price and exchange rate changes and that a complex web of time varying first and second order conditional moment interactions affects both the capm and feedback trading components of the model despite the difficulties we identify a significant role played by speculation in the oil market which is consistent with the observed large daily upward and downward shifts in prices a clear evidence that it is not a fundamental driven market thus from a policy point of view given the impact of volatile oil prices on global inflation and growth actions that monitor speculative activities on commodity markets more effectively are to be welcomed

credit reallocation deleveraging and financial crises this paper studies how the process of reallocation of credit across firms behaves before and after financial crises applying the methodology typically used for measuring job reallocation we track credit reallocation across korean firms for over three decades 1980 2012 the credit boom preceding the 1997 crisis featured a slowdown of credit reallocation after the crisis and the associated reforms the creditless recovery deleveraging masked a dramatic intensification and increased procyclicality of credit reallocation the findings suggest that the intensification of reallocation was efficiency enhancing

financial distress and underemployment a reasonable model of the labour market over the business cycle should predict among other things that a in very low states of product demand there may be too little employment from an efficiency perspective but as the state improves employment will increase until ultimately it is efficiently deployed and b in low states of demand a worker s welfare level will be low and as the state of the world improves so will the worker s welfare except possibly at high levels of demand where the worker s utility may start to fall surprisingly there does not exist a labour contract based model that is consistent with predictions a and b in fact the standard results in the literature are if leisure is a normal good then there will be too much employment in essentially all states of the world and the welfare of the worker declines as the state of the world improves in this paper a labour contracting model is constructed that is consistent with the above mentioned predictions two necessary ingredients in the model are the possibility of financial distress in low demand states and partial provability in contracting financial distress can be viewed as frustrating renegotiation and thus inefficient outcomes are possible in equilibrium partial provability the ability of an informed player to make verifiable claims or statements to an uninformed player eliminates certain kinds of inefficient outcomes in particular it eliminates the possibility that in equilibrium there is too much employment this last result is interesting in itself because it is commonly believed that normality of leisure necessarily implies that labour contracting models will generate employment levels that are too high from an efficiency perspective

preemption and rent equalization in the adoption of new technology we study the adoption of a new technology to illustrate the effects of preemption in games of timing we show that the threat of preemption equalizes rents in a duopoly but that this result does not extend to the general oligopoly game if the gain to preemption is sufficiently small then the optimal symmetric outcome which involves late adoption is an equilibrium this contrasts with reinganum s result that in precommitment equilibria there must be diffusion we develop a new and richer formalism for modeling games of timing which permits a continuoustime representation of the limit of discrete time mixed strategy equilibria

rational expectations risk and efficiency in energy futures markets abstract conditional on the hypothesis that energy futures markets are efficient or rational this paper uses fama s 3 regression approach to measure the information in energy futures prices about future spot prices and time varying premiums the paper finds that the premium and expected future spot price components of energy futures prices are negatively correlated and that most of the variation in futures prices is variation in expected premiums

the benefits of lending relationships evidence from small business data this paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm we analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the small business administration the primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases we find smaller effects on the price of credit attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple lenders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit in sum relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices

the relationship between crude oil spot and futures prices cointegration linear and nonlinear causality the present study investigates the linear and nonlinear causal linkages between daily spot and futures prices for maturities of one two three and four months of west texas intermediate wti crude oil the data cover two periods october 1991 october 1999 and november 1999 october 2007 with the latter being significantly more turbulent apart from the conventional linear granger test we apply a new nonparametric test for nonlinear causality by diks and panchenko after controlling for cointegration in addition to the traditional pairwise analysis we test for causality while correcting for the effects of the other variables to check if any of the observed causality is strictly nonlinear in nature we also examine the nonlinear causal relationships of vecm filtered residuals finally we investigate the hypothesis of nonlinear non causality after controlling for conditional heteroskedasticity in the data using a garch bekk model whilst the linear causal relationships disappear after vecm cointegration filtering nonlinear causal linkages in some cases persist even after garch filtering in both periods this indicates that spot and futures returns may exhibit asymmetric garch effects and or statistically significant higher order conditional moments moreover the results imply that if nonlinear effects are accounted for neither market leads or lags the other consistently videlicet the pattern of leads and lags changes over time

expectations learning and the changing relationship between oil prices and the macroeconomy this paper estimates a structural general equilibrium model to investigate the changing relationship between the oil price and macroeconomic variables the oil price through the role of oil in production and consumption affects aggregate demand and supply in the model the assumption of rational expectations is relaxed in favor of learning oil prices therefore affect the economy through an additional channel i e through their effect on the formation of agents beliefs the estimated learning dynamics indicates that economic agents perceptions about the effects of oil prices on the economy have changed over time oil prices were perceived to have large effects on output and inflation in the 1970s but only milder effects after the mid 1980s since expectations play a large role in the determination of output and inflation the effects of oil price increases on expectations can magnify the response of macroeconomic variables to oil price shocks in the estimated model in fact the implied responses of output and inflation to oil price shocks were much more pronounced in the 1970s than in 2008 therefore through the time variation in the impact of oil prices on beliefs the paper can successfully explain the observed weakening of the effects of oil price shocks on real activity and inflation