IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/35670.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do financial investors affect commodity prices? The case of Hard Red Winter Wheat

Author

Listed:
  • Girardi, Daniele

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to assess empirically whether speculative financial investments have affected wheat price dynamics in recent years. To address this issue we will (1) analyze recent agricultural price dynamics and their drivers (2) outline the process of ‘financialization’ of agricultural commodity markets, identifying the macroeconomic, monetary and legislative factors which favored it and (3) present an econometric analysis using Hard Red Winter (HRW) wheat as a case study. Since 2007 HRW wheat price fluctuations have been positively related to US stock market returns and oil price movements. These correlations appear to be determined by commodity index traders, a category of financial investors, since both these relationships proved to be spurious, with the most tracked commodity index as the confounding variable.

Suggested Citation

  • Girardi, Daniele, 2011. "Do financial investors affect commodity prices? The case of Hard Red Winter Wheat," MPRA Paper 35670, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:35670
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/35670/1/MPRA_paper_35670.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Büyükşahin, Bahattin & Robe, Michel A., 2014. "Speculators, commodities and cross-market linkages," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 38-70.
    2. Donald W. K. Andrews, 2003. "Tests for Parameter Instability and Structural Change with Unknown Change Point: A Corrigendum," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 71(1), pages 395-397, January.
    3. Rafael E. de Hoyos & Denis Medvedev, 2011. "Poverty Effects of Higher Food Prices: A Global Perspective," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 15(3), pages 387-402, August.
    4. Ke Tang & Wei Xiong, 2010. "Index Investment and Financialization of Commodities," NBER Working Papers 16385, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. David Dawe, 2009. "The Unimportance of “Low” World Grain Stocks for Recent World Price Increases," Working Papers 09-01, Agricultural and Development Economics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO - ESA).
    6. Hernandez, Manuel & Torero, Maximo, 2010. "Examining the dynamic relationship between spot and future prices of agricultural commodities," IFPRI discussion papers 988, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    7. Mitchell, Donald, 2008. "A note on rising food prices," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4682, The World Bank.
    8. Dwight R. Sanders & Scott H. Irwin, 2010. "A speculative bubble in commodity futures prices? Cross‐sectional evidence," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 41(1), pages 25-32, January.
    9. Gary Gorton & K. Geert Rouwenhorst, 2004. "Facts and Fantasies about Commodity Futures," NBER Working Papers 10595, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Scott H. Irwin & Dwight R. Sanders, 2011. "Index Funds, Financialization, and Commodity Futures Markets," Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 33(1), pages 1-31.
    11. Christopher L. Gilbert, 2008. "How to Understand High Food Prices," Department of Economics Working Papers 0823, Department of Economics, University of Trento, Italia.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Girardi, Daniele, 2012. "Do financial investors affect the price of wheat?," MPRA Paper 40285, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Bernhard Troester, 2012. "The determinants of the recent food price surges – A basic supply and demand model," Competence Centre on Money, Trade, Finance and Development 1206, Hochschule fuer Technik und Wirtschaft, Berlin.
    3. Girardi, Daniele, 2012. "A brief essay on the financialization of agricultural commodity markets," MPRA Paper 44771, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Baldi, Lucia & Peri, Massimo & Vandone, Daniela, 2011. "Price Discovery in Agricultural Commodities: The Shifting Relationship Between Spot and Future Prices," 2011 International Congress, August 30-September 2, 2011, Zurich, Switzerland 114237, European Association of Agricultural Economists.
    5. Gunther Capelle-Blancard & Dramane Coulibaly, 2011. "Index trading and agricultural commodity prices: A panel Granger causality analysis," International Economics, CEPII research center, issue 126-127, pages 51-71.
    6. Lehecka, Georg V., 2013. "Have food and financial markets integrated? An empirical assessment on aggregate data," 53rd Annual Conference, Berlin, Germany, September 25-27, 2013 156108, German Association of Agricultural Economists (GEWISOLA).
    7. Troester, Bernhard & Staritz, Cornelia, 2013. "Fundamentals or financialisation of commodity markets: What determines recent wheat prices?," Working Papers 43, Austrian Foundation for Development Research (ÖFSE).
    8. Irwin, Scott H. & Sanders, Dwight R., 2012. "Financialization and Structural Change in Commodity Futures Markets," Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 44(3), pages 371-396, August.
    9. William Arrata & Alejandro Bernales & Virginie Coudert, 2013. "The Effects of Derivatives on Underlying Financial Markets: Equity Options, Commodity Derivatives and Credit Default Swaps," SUERF 50th Anniversary Volume Chapters, in: Morten Balling & Ernest Gnan (ed.), 50 Years of Money and Finance: Lessons and Challenges, chapter 13, pages 445-473, SUERF - The European Money and Finance Forum.
    10. Etienne, Xiaoli L. & Irwin, Scott H. & Garcia, Philip, 2013. "Dissecting Corn Price Movements with Directed Acyclic Graphs," 2013 Annual Meeting, August 4-6, 2013, Washington, D.C. 151279, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    11. Ing-Haw Cheng & Andrei Kirilenko & Wei Xiong, 2015. "Convective Risk Flows in Commodity Futures Markets," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 19(5), pages 1733-1781.
    12. James D. Hamilton & Jing Cynthia Wu, 2015. "Effects Of Index‐Fund Investing On Commodity Futures Prices," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 56(1), pages 187-205, February.
    13. Robert Czudaj & Joscha Beckmann, 2012. "Spot and futures commodity markets and the unbiasedness hypothesis - evidence from a novel panel unit root test," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 32(2), pages 1695-1707.
    14. Yin, Libo & Zhou, Yimin, 2016. "What drives long-term oil market volatility? Fundamentals versus speculation," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 10, pages 1-26.
    15. Symeonidis, Lazaros & Prokopczuk, Marcel & Brooks, Chris & Lazar, Emese, 2012. "Futures basis, inventory and commodity price volatility: An empirical analysis," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 29(6), pages 2651-2663.
    16. Massimo PERI & Daniela VANDONE & Lucia BALDI, 2012. "Internet, noise trading and commodity prices," Departmental Working Papers 2012-07, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    17. Haase, Marco & Huss, Matthias, 2018. "Guilty speculators? Range-based conditional volatility in a cross-section of wheat futures," Journal of Commodity Markets, Elsevier, vol. 10(C), pages 29-46.
    18. Irwin, Scott H. & Sanders, Dwight R., 2012. "Testing the Masters Hypothesis in commodity futures markets," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 256-269.
    19. Sophie van Huellen, 2013. "Price Non-Convergence in Commodities: A Case Study of the Wheat Conundrum," Working Papers 185, Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, UK.
    20. Haase, Marco & Seiler Zimmermann, Yvonne & Zimmermann, Heinz, 2016. "The impact of speculation on commodity futures markets – A review of the findings of 100 empirical studies," Journal of Commodity Markets, Elsevier, vol. 3(1), pages 1-15.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Agricultural Commodity Prices; Global Commodity Crises; Financialization; Commodity Futures Markets; Commodity Index Trading; Agricultural Markets; Commodity Futures Pricing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q17 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Agriculture in International Trade

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:35670. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.