Regime-dependent topological properties of biofuels networks

In this paper, we analyze the relationships between biodiesel, ethanol and related fuels and agricultural commodities with a use of minimal spanning trees and hierarchical trees. To distinguish between short term and long term effects, we construct the trees for different frequencies (weekly, monthly and quarterly). At lower frequencies, the system splits into two well separated branches – a fuels part and a food part. Biodiesel tends to the fuels branch and ethanol to the food branch. We especially concentrate on the links and comovements between the commodities for different stages of the market based on the level of prices of important commodities or groups of commodities. Such approach uncovers some more interesting results and, in general, confirms the separation of network into fuels and food for majority of analyzed cases. Copyright EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013