price movements and price discovery in futures and cash markets r isk transfer and price discovery are two of the major contributions of futures markets to the organization of economic activity working 1962 evans 1978 p 80 and silber 1981 risk transfer refers to hedgers using futures contracts to shift price risk to others price discovery refers to the use of futures prices for pricing cash market transactions working 1948 wiese 1978 p 87 and lake 1978 p 161 the significance of both contributions depends upon a close relationship between the prices of futures contracts and cash commodities this paper examines the characteristics of price movements in cash or spot markets and futures markets for storable commodities section ii presents an analytical model of simultaneous price dynamics which suggests that over short intervals of time the correlation of price changes is a function of the elasticity of arbitrage between the physical commodity and its counterpart futures contract greater elasticity fosters more highly correlated price changes and thereby facilitates the risk transfer function the elasticity of supply of arbitrage services is constrained by among other things storage and transaction costs thus futures contracts will not in general provide perfect risk transfer facilities over short time horizons the essence of the price discovery function of futures markets hinges on whether new information is reflected first in changed futures prices or in changed cash prices hoffman 1932 pp 258259 the model in section ii provides a framework for analyzing whether one market is dominant in terms of information flows and price discovery in section iii we develop a model based on section ii which is appropriate for estimating the lead lag relationship between cash prices and futures prices section iv presents empirical estimates of the parameters of the model for seven different storable commodities wheat corn oats frozen orange juice concentrates copper gold and silver the cost of arbitrage between cash and futures differs across these commodities for this reason we are not surprised to find inter commodity differences in the correlation of short run price changes and in the substitutability of futures contracts for cash market positions with respect to the price discovery function of futures markets we find that while futures markets dominate cash markets cash prices do not merely echo futures prices there are reverse information flows from cash markets to futures markets as well

global warming irreversibility and learning a number of economists have argued that the literature on the irreversibility effect implies that current abatement of greenhouse gas emissions should be greater when there is the possibility of obtaining better information in the future about the potential damages from global warming than when there is no possibility of obtaining better information in this paper we show that even the simplest model of global warming does not satisfy either of epstein s 1980 sufficient conditions so it is not possible to use epstein s analysis to tell whether the irreversibility effect applies to models of global warming we derive an alternative sufficient condition for the irreversibility effect to hold

climate policy under uncertain and heterogeneous climate damages we highlight that uncertainty about climate damages and the fact that damages will be distributed heterogeneously across the global population can jointly be an argument for substantially stricter climate policy even if uncertainty and heterogeneity in isolation are not the reason is that a given climate risk borne by fewer people implies greater welfare losses however these losses turn out to be significant only if society is both risk and inequality averse and if climate damages are highly heterogeneous we discuss how insurance and self insurance of climate risk could theoretically mitigate this joint effect of uncertainty and heterogeneity and thus admit weaker climate policy insurance provides more efficient risk sharing and self insurance allows strongly impacted individuals to compensate damages by increasing savings we first use a simple analytical model to introduce the different concepts and then provide more realistic results from the integrated assessment model dice

the aggregation of climate change damages a welfare theoretic approach the economic value of environmental goods is commonly determined using the concepts of willingness to pay wtp or willingness to accept wta however the wtp wta observed in different countries or between individuals will differ according to socio economic characteristics in particular income this notion of differentiated values for otherwise identical goods say a given reduction in mortality risk has been criticized as unethical most recently in the context of the social cost chapter of the ipcc second assessment report these critics argue that being a function of income wtp wta estimates reflect the unfairness in the current income distribution and for equity reasons uniform per unit values should therefore be applied across individuals and countries this paper analyses the role of equity in the aggregation of climate change damage estimates using basic tools of welfare economics it shows one way of how wtp wta estimates can be corrected in aggregation if the underlying income distribution is considered unfair it proposes that in the aggregation process individual estimates be weighted with an equity factor derived from the social welfare and utility functions equity weighting can significantly increase aggregate global damage figures although some specifications of weighting functions also imply reduced estimates the paper also shows that while the postulate of uniform per unit values is compatible with a wide range of reasonable utility and welfare specifications there are also cases where the common value notion is not compatible with defensible welfare concepts

climatic cost benefit analysis under uncertainty and learning on climate sensitivity and damages abstract cost benefit analyses on climate change have drawn considerable critique primarily due to contestable choices of discounting and high uncertainties in climate sensitivity and climatic damages consequentially it is argued that cost benefit analysis can suggest mitigation rates that are nearly arbitrary this article investigates how firm conclusions can be made from cost benefit analysis if the main uncertainties are considered endogenously in the analysis and an extensive sensitivity analysis is carried out regarding the contestable assumptions the score model is used to calculate optimal emission pathways and carbon prices that hedge against climate sensitivity and damage risks using a wide range of plausible parametrizations in a vast majority of cases the near term emissions fall between 1 5 c and 2 c emission pathways giving thus support for the paris agreement targets sequential decision making allows hedging against uncertainties and readjusting mitigation efforts over time to reflect new information leading to diverse stabilization temperatures in the long term assumptions on mitigation costs climate sensitivity and damages affect optimal near term mitigation and long term stabilization temperature more strongly than the discount rate choice the consideration of parametric uncertainty on climate sensitivity and damages adds a substantial risk component to carbon pricing while learning can induce significant price volatility in a decadal timescale

on the identification of cointegrated systems in small samples a modelling strategy with an application to uk wages and prices abstract this paper discusses the practical application of identification in cointegrated systems it will argue that in a common realistic modelling situation of a limited data set and the theory requirements of a fairly rich model the techniques proposed in the existing literature are almost impossible to implement successfully there are crucial decisions to be made over the order in which various restrictions are imposed in the move from a general unrestricted vector error correction model vecm to the fully over identified vecm we will argue that imposing exogeneity restrictions at the earliest possible stage of the model reduction process and then restricting the dynamic adjustment of the model hugely increases the power of tests of overidentifying restrictions on the long run cointegrating vectors in practice this means that a thorough use of economic theory at an early stage rather than treating a model as a pure statistical artefact can yield enormous benefits

the role of trader positions in spot and futures prices for wti abstract we extend the analysis of causal relations between trader positions and oil prices and the process of price discovery by estimating a cointegrating vector autoregression cvar model that expands the cash and carry relation between spot and futures prices to quantify long and short run relations among oil prices trader positions interest rates and oil inventories results indicate that oil inventories and trader positions are needed to generate cointegration between spot and futures prices the presence of trader positions and oil inventories suggest that both play a role in price discovery furthermore the cointegrating relation for price loads into the equation for both oil prices and trader positions this suggests a bi directional simultaneous adjustment process between oil prices and trader positions this expands the unidirectional causal relation from oil prices to trader positions that is generated by previous studies additional results suggest that price discovery occurs in the market for heavily traded near month futures contracts but discovery for thin far month futures markets occurs in the spot market together these results suggest mechanisms by which speculation could affect oil prices but the results presented here are moot regarding their effects

a new way of measuring the wti brent spread globalization shock persistence and common trends abstract the standard cointegration and the persistence of the spread of the brent wti price have been widely analyzed however no studies have been able to present evidence of both issues jointly so far a novel focus is presented in this paper from the application of the fractionally cointegrated vector autoregressive fcvar approach which allows the rigidity of the standard cointegration to be solved as result of the application of the fcvar model we identify several degrees of globalization by analyzing the order of integration of the error correction term indeed by using permanent transitory decomposition analysis we present what drives the relationship between both oil crude prices information the findings shown here reveal that the brent wti market is strongly globalized nevertheless the brent wti price spread follows a long memory process and the brent drives the brent wti price structure these results sustain some corollaries on economic policies for economic agents policy makers and business operators

cointegration between oil spot and future prices of the same and different grades in the presence of structural change the purpose of this study is to examine whether crude oil spot and futures prices of the same and different grades are cointegrated using a residual based cointegration test that allows for one structural break in the cointegrating vector and high frequency data we choose the us wti and the uk brent as the representative crudes for this analysis since these two crudes have well established spot and futures markets we find that spot and future prices of the same grade as well as spot and futures prices of different grades are cointegrated we examine potential causes of structural change as revealed by the cointegration test in terms of events that have impacted on world oil markets as well as discuss the implications of the results for hedge managers investors and regulators

on modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change with climate change as prototype example this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low probability high impact catastrophes even when updated by bayesian learning uncertain structural parameters induce a critical tail fattening of posterior predictive distributions such fattened tails have strong im plications for situations like climate change where a catastrophe is theoretically possible because prior knowledge cannot place sufficiently narrow bounds on overall damages this paper shows that the economic consequences of fat tailed structural uncertainty along with unsureness about high temperature damages can readily outweigh the effects of discounting in climate change policy analysis

pseudo panel data models with cohort interactive effects when genuine panel data samples are not available repeated cross sectional surveys can be used to form so called pseudo panels in this article we investigate the properties of linear pseudo panel data estimators with fixed number of cohorts and time observations we extend standard linear pseudo panel data setup to models with factor residuals by adapting the quasi differencing approach developed for genuine panels in a monte carlo study we find that the proposed procedure has good finite sample properties in situations with endogeneity cohort interactive effects and near nonidentification finally as an illustration the proposed method is applied to data from ecuador to study labor supply elasticity supplementary materials for this article are available online

determining the social cost of carbon under damage and climate sensitivity uncertainty this article quantifies the impact on optimal climate policy of both damage elasticity and equilibrium climate sensitivity uncertainty under separable preferences for risk and intergenerational inequality the primary findings are as follows 1 such preferences can depress the social cost of carbon scc when calibration aims at matching actual economic outcomes countering the prevailing view that the scc is greater with separable than with conventional entangled preferences 2 damage elasticity uncertainty has larger effects on climate policy than equilibrium climate sensitivity uncertainty even under high impact tail risk of the latter 3 risk aversion decisively strengthens optimal climate policy under joint damage and climate sensitivity uncertainty than with a single source of uncertainty alone indeed failing to account for the interaction between damage and climate sensitivity uncertainty underestimates the cost of climate change by more than us dollars 1 trillion

on international equity weights and national decision making on climate change abstract estimates of the marginal damage costs of carbon dioxide emissions require the aggregation of monetised impacts of climate change over people with different incomes and in different jurisdictions implicitly or explicitly such estimates assume a social welfare function and hence a particular attitude towards equity and justice we show that previous approaches to equity weighting are inappropriate from a national decision maker s point of view because domestic impacts are not valued at domestic values we propose four alternatives sovereignty altruism good neighbour and compensation with different views on concern for and liability towards foreigners the four alternatives imply radically different estimates of the social cost of carbon and hence the optimal intensity of climate policy

unbiasedness and time varying risk premia in the crude oil futures market abstract this paper presents some empirical evidence on market efficiency and unbiasedness in the crude oil futures market and some related issues on the basis of monthly observations on spot and futures prices of the west texas intermediate wti crude oil several tests are carried out on the relevant hypotheses the evidence suggests that futures prices are neither unbiased nor efficient forecasters of spot prices furthermore a garch m 1 1 model reveals the existence of a time varying risk premium

when managers cover their posteriors making the decisions the market wants to see the stock market has opinions as to what choices firms should make we show that concern for current share prices may lead managers to make these choices rather than those suggested by their own superior information even when arbitrarily many privately informed firms have to make a similar decision the market s prejudices may still prevail we compare the distortions that arise from share price maximization with those due to herd behavior among profit maximizing firms and show that the former results in strictly less efficient use of information

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

welfare as equity equivalents equity or its counterpart inequity plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of social welfare in different dimensions in this paper we revisit the concept of inequity in the sense of unequal distributions across individuals time and states of the world using a unified framework that generalizes the standard expected discounted utilitarianism approach we propose a general measure of welfare as equity equivalents and a corresponding inequity index we show that allowing for different attitudes toward inequity across different dimensions covers a scope of possible inequity preferences with different interpretations we then prove that the order of aggregation across the different dimensions matters for welfare evaluations finally we show that many of the welfare theoretical approaches recently developed in the literature can be interpreted as special cases of this general framework

weight factors in cost benefit analysis of climate change equity considerations may justify the use of weight factors when estimating the costs of climate change this paper reviews different weight factors that have been used in the climate economics literature based on a simple model it is shown that although the different weight factors imply substantially different cost damage estimates they actually yield the same optimal emission reductions this paradox is explained by the fact that some of the approaches require that also the abatement costs are weighted and this offsets the effect of the diverging cost damage estimates the model is then used to analyse the importance weighting may have on the overall cost benefit analysis at present when most of the global emissions of fossil co2 originate from the industrialised countries the global optimal emissions are considerably lower if costs are weighted however the more the emissions in developing countries grow the less important becomes the introduction of weight factors in cost benefit analysis of climate change for the global emission reductions in the model developed here on a regional level the introduction of weight factors continues to play an important role implying substantially lower emissions in the rich region and slightly higher in the poor

oil and energy price volatility it is commonly believed that since the 1973 oil crisis oil and energy prices have been more volatile than other commodity prices this study examines monthly producer prices for thousands of products over the period january 1945 through august 2005 the results show that crude oil refined petroleum and natural gas prices are more volatile than prices for about 95 of products sold by domestic producers relative to crude commodities however crude oil prices are currently more volatile than about 65 of other products and oil price volatility first exceeded the median for crude commodities following the 1986 drop in oil prices

efficient estimation with panel data when instruments are predetermined an empirical comparison of moment condition estimators i examine the empirical performance of instrumental variables estimators with predetermined instruments in an application to life cycle labor supply under uncertainty the estimators studied are two stage least squares generalized method of moments gmm forward filter independently weighted gmm and split sample instrumental variables i compare the bias efficiency trade off for the estimators using bootstrap algorithms suggested by freedman and by brown and newey results indicate that the downward bias in gmm is quite severe as the number of moment conditions expands outweighing the gains in efficiency the forward filter estimator however has lower bias and is more efficient than two stage least squares

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

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

a regional dynamic general equilibrium model of alternative climate change strategies outcomes and noncooperative equilibria this study finds that cooperative policies show much higher levels of emissions reductions than do noncooperative strategies that there are substantial differences in the levels of controls in both the cooperative and the noncooperative policies among different countries and that high income countries may be the major losers from cooperation jel h41 q4 q2 q20

the impact of climate change on the balanced growth equivalent an application of fund the stern review added balanced growth equivalents bge to the economic climate change research agenda we first propose rigorous definitions of the bge for multiple regions and under uncertainty we show that the change in the bge is independent of the assumed scenario of per capita income for comparable welfare economic assumptions as the stern review we calculate lower changes in bge between a business as usual scenario and one without climate impacts with the model fund than the stern review found with the model page we find that mitigation policies give even lower changes in bge and argue that those policy choices should be the focus of the research effort rather than total damage estimates according to our results the current carbon tax should be below 55 tc sensitivity analyses show that the stern review chose parameters that imply high impact estimates however for regionally disaggregated welfare functions we find changes in bge that are significantly higher than the results from the stern review both for total damage as for policy analysis with regional disaggregation and high risk aversion we observe fat tails and with that very high welfare losses

the effect of the financial sector on the evolution of oil prices analysis of the contribution of the futures market to the price discovery process in the wti spot market abstract the aim of this article is to empirically measure the contribution of the futures market to the price discovery process in the spot market for benchmark crude oils specifically that for west texas intermediate wti for this purpose we test the hypothesis that the recent evolution of the financial markets has affected the future oil market so as to increase its contribution to the price discovery process of the spot market we modeled the relation between wti spot and future prices as a cointegration relation by using the kalman filter technique it was possible to obtain a time varying measure of the contribution of future markets to the price discovery mechanism the results show that in the case of wti the contribution of the futures market has been increasing especially between 2003 and 2008 and then again after the start of 2009 evidencing the growing importance of factors particular to the financial markets in determining oil prices in recent years during 2009 the spot prices adjusted to agents future expectations rather than to the current supply and demand conditions

hedgers funds and small speculators in the energy futures markets an analysis of the cftc s commitments of traders reports the commodity futures trading commission cftc s commitments of traders cot data are examined for crude oil unleaded gasoline heating oil and natural gas futures contracts the collection procedures for the cot data are first examined followed by granger causality tests to determine if relationships between trader positions and market prices exist a positive correlation between returns and positions held by noncommercial traders and a negative correlation between commercial positions and market returns are found furthermore positive returns result in an increase in noncommercial net positions in the following week whereas the net long positions held by commercial hedgers decline following price increases however traders net positions do not lead market returns in general

the dynamics of crude oil price differentials abstract crude oil price differentials are modelled as a two regime threshold autoregressive tar process using the method proposed by caner and hansen caner m hansen b e threshold autoregression with a unit root econometrica 2001 69 1555 1596 while standard unit root tests suggest that the prices of crude oil of different varieties move closely together such that their price differential is stationary the tar results indicate strong evidence of threshold effects in the adjustment process to the long run equilibrium these findings suggest that crude oil prices are linked and thus at the very general level the oil market is one great pool adelman m a international oil agreements the energy journal 1984 5 1 9 however differences in the dynamics of adjustment suggest that within this one pool oil markets are not necessarily integrated in every time period and hence the dynamics of crude oil price differentials may not follow a stationary process at all times although the development of a liquid futures market around the crude oil benchmarks has helped make some distant markets more unified arbitrage is not costless or risk free and temporary breakdowns in the benchmarks can lead to decoupling of crude oil prices

earnings mobility and measurement error a pseudo panel approach the degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market but estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non random attrition from the panel this paper shows that dynamic pseudo panel methods can be used to consistently estimate measures of absolute and conditional mobility in the presence of non classical measurement errors these methods are applied to data on earnings from a mexican quarterly rotating panel absolute mobility in earnings is found to be very low in mexico suggesting that the high level of inequality found in the cross section will persist over time however the paper finds conditional mobility to be high so that households are able to recover quickly from earnings shocks these findings suggest a role for policies which address underlying inequalities in earnings opportunities