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This paper examines the information efficiency of KOSDAQ50 and KOSPI200 index futures markets. The study analyzes and compares both markets in three respects : 1) price discovery (lead-lag relationship between spot and futures markets.), 2) volatility-volume relationship, and 3) mispricings between spot and futures prices. The first, analysis shows the in the KOSPI200 market, futures price leads spot price. While spot price leads futures price in the KOSDAQ50 market. The second analysis shows that the volatility-volume relation is positive in the KOSPI200 futures market, supporting the hypothesis of mixture of distribution. In contrast, there is little relation between volume and volatility in the KOSDAQ50 futures market. This result casts doubt that the futures market price reflects information. The last analysis shows that the magnitude of mispricing becomes smaller with more volume in the KOSPI200 futures market, while it becomes larger with more volume in the KOSDAQ50 futures market. The overall results imply that the KOSDAQ50 futures market is less informationally efficient that the KOSPI200 market. The inefficiency appears due to the lack of institutional investor participation, especially securities firms, in making up the market.

Discusses the attractions of property to institutional investors. Describes the evolution of future markets from forward contracts in commodity markets and financial and stock market index futures to the current UK proposal for property index futures. Concludes that property professionals should make every effort to understand and develop the proposed market in a way which will benefit property investors most effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether futures markets play a dominant role in the price discovery process. The rate of convergence of information from one market to another is analyzed to infer the efficiency of futures as an effective hedging tool.

The paper uses a two‐regime threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) and a two‐regime threshold autoregression for six commodities. The regimes (or states) are defined around the expiration week of the futures contract.

This paper finds evidence for price discovery process happening in the futures market in five out of six commodities. However, the rate of convergence of information is slow, particularly in the non‐expiration weeks. For copper, gold and silver, the rate of convergence is almost instantaneous during the expiration week of the futures contract affirming the utility of futures contracts as an effective hedging tool. In case of chickpeas, nickel and rubber the convergence worsens during the expiration week indicating the non‐usability of futures contract for hedging.

This paper extends the framework developed by Garbade et al. by superimposing a two‐regime TVAR model to quantify the price discovery process. It is the first paper to analyze the differential impact of price discovery and convergence during expiration week (compared to non‐expiration weeks) for the Indian commodities market.

Holbrook Working (1949) discovered that the percentage change in futures prices seemed to be largelyrandom. This led Paul Samuelson (1965) to develop the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) which claims that the current spot and futures1 prices fully reflect all relevant information. Furthermore, because the future flow of information cannot be anticipated, price changes will not be serially correlated. These papers linked the notion of randomness of price changes to informational efficiency. From that point on, a major part of the empirical studies of asset markets has been the application of time series analysis to asset prices, in order to evaluate whether the price changes are random and whether futures prices reflect all available information. As the statistical tests became more sophisticated, the number of empirical studies increased and the results became more contradictory and difficult to interpret. An economic theorist can only be bemused by contemplating the empirical/econometric studies in the finance literature.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze cointegration and causality relationships between spot and futures markets in Turkish foreign‐exchange markets.

The research employs Bounds cointegration test and Toda‐Yamamoto causality test to detect a possible risk transmission between spot and futures markets. Time series of Turkish spot and futures foreign‐exchange markets from January 2, 2006 to March 25, 2008 on a daily basis are used for empirical analysis.

The empirical tests suggest that there is unidirectional causality running from future exchange‐rate market to spot market implying that foreign‐exchange markets have informational efficiency in Turkey.

The paper has originality in both employing Bounds test and Toda‐Yamamoto test to examine the relationship between spots and derivative markets, and in being one of the first empirical papers examining Turkish futures markets. In addition, the paper presents a guide on how Bounds and Toda‐Yamamoto tests can be applied to detect interactions among markets without data stationarity.

The paper aims to explore the informational role of futures volume in the simultaneous relationship between option volume and spot volatility to forecast the volatility of the underlying asset.

The generalized method of moments is used to estimate the simultaneous equations of endogeneity between spot volatility and option volume. Futures volume is specified as an exogenous variable in both legs of the estimation of simultaneous equations. However, the future volume is also tested as a dependent variable to prove preference for investment by informed investors in futures along with options.

The result indicates that futures volume has a significant association with the bi-directional simultaneous equation estimation between spot volatility and option volume. Moreover, the result of this paper proves that informed investors also prefer futures markets over the spot market. However, there is no change observed in the relationship between option volume and spot volatility due to either call or put options or moneyness.

The possible role of futures volume in the simultaneous equations between spot volatility and option volume has not yet been researched. This paper pioneers in demonstrating that futures volume is an exogenous variable in the simultaneous equation modeling between spot volatility and option volume. Moreover, in the contemporaneous as well as predictive relationships between spot volatility and option volume, futures volume as an exogenous variable is significant in forecasting spot volatility. In addition to this, the current paper uniquely provides evidence of investment in futures also over the spot market by informed investors.

The National Pension Service (NPS) of Korea is one of the largest institutional investors in the world and it has been known as the market stabilizer in the Korean stock market. Nevertheless, it is hard to find the research about the impact of the NPS on the futures market. We investigated the effect of the NPS’s trading KOSPI200 futures on the returns, the liquidity and the volatility of the market using the recent ten years’ transaction data. The main findings are as follows. First, the NPS’s net investment flow (NIF) in the KOSPI200 futures market shows the predictability about the returns of both KOSPI200 futures and KOSPI200 spot index. Second, the NPS’s NIF in the KOSPI200 futures market improves the liquidity of the KOSPI market, where the transactions involved in both the spot market and the futures market occur. Third, the NPS’s NIF in the KOSPI200 futures market reduces the volatility of both the KOSPI200 futures market and the KOSPI market. Unlike the prior studies showing that our futures market tends to increase the volatility of the stock market through the volatility transfer, our finding suggests that the NPS’s trading KOSPI200 futures contributes to decreasing the volatility in both markets. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first study that investigates the impact of the NPS’s trading KOSPI200 futures on the KOSPI200 futures market and the stock market. It shows that the NPS plays a role of the market stabilizer in the futures market. In addition, the NPS’s trading KOSPI200 futures also affects the KOSPI stock market, stabilizing it in terms of both the liquidity and the volatility.

This study explores the price linkage between the Chinese commodity futures market and other dominant futures markets, and examines the forces behind the price linkages. The contribution by the trading hour innovations in the United States (or United Kingdom) market to the overnight price changes in the Chinese market is larger in scale than the contribution by the daytime information from the Chinese market to the overnight returns of the corresponding US (or UK) market. Several futures have significant interactions of the domestic and foreign factors in the price linkages while the Chinese domestic factors explain better the global market price linkage in some futures (aluminum, gold, and corn), demonstrating the leading role of the Chinese futures markets in these world markets.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the possible consequences of ban on futures trading of agriculture commodities in India by examining three critical issues: first, the author explores whether price discovery dominance changes between futures and spot in the pre-ban and post-relaunch phase both in the long run and short run. Second, the author examines the impact of ban and relaunch of futures trading on its underlying spot volatility for five sample cases of agriculture commodities (Wheat, Sugar, Soya Refined Oil, Rubber and Chana) using both parametric and non-parametric tests. Third, the author revisits the destabilization hypothesis in the light of ban on futures trading by examining the impact of unexpected component of liquidity of futures on spot volatility.

The author uses widely adopted methodology of co-integration to examine long-run relationship between spot and futures, while the short-run relationship is investigated using vector error correction model (VECM) and Granger causality to test price discovery in the pre-ban and post-relaunch phases. The second objective is explored using a combination of parametric and non-parametric tests such as Welch one-way ANOVA and Kruskal–Wallis test, respectively, to gauge the impact of ban on futures trading on spot volatility along with post hoc tests to investigate pairwise comparison of spot volatility among three phases (pre-ban, ban and post-relaunch) using Dunn Test. In addition, extensive robustness test is undertaken by adopting augmented E-GARCH model to ascertain the impact of ban and relaunch of futures trading on spot volatility. The third objective is investigated using Granger causality test between spot volatility and unexpected component of liquidity of futures estimated using Hodrick and Prescott (HP) filter to re-visit the destabilization hypothesis.

The author found extensive evidence for the dominance of futures market in the price discovery of agriculture commodities both in the pre-ban and post-relaunch phases in India. The ban on futures trading is found to have a destabilizing impact on spot volatility as evident from the findings of Wheat, Sugar and Rubber. In addition, it is observed that spot volatility was highest during the ban phase as compared to the pre-ban and post-relaunch phases for all four commodities barring Chana. The author found that destabilisation hypothesis holds true during the pre ban phase, while weakening of destabilization hypothesis is observed in the post-relaunch phase as unexpected futures liquidity has no role in driving the spot volatility.

This study is a novel attempt to empirically examine the potential impact of ban and relaunch of futures trading of agriculture commodities on two key market quality dimensions – price discovery and spot volatility. In addition, destabilization hypothesis is revisited to investigate the impact of futures trading on spot volatility during the pre-ban and post-relaunch period.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the current global crisis on the integration and co‐movements of selected stock index futures markets.

Time series techniques of cointegration and weekly data covering the period from January 2001 to December 2009 were used in this study. The period of analysis was divided into two periods, namely the pre‐crisis period (January 2001‐July 2007) and during crisis period (August 2007‐December 2009).

No evidence was found of cointegration among the stock index futures markets in both periods. Accordingly, the 2007 subprime crisis does not seem to affect the long‐run co‐movements among the stock index futures markets.

The stock index futures markets provide opportunity for the potential benefits from international portfolio diversification and hedging strategies even after the subprime crisis. The stock index futures significantly extended the variety of investment and risk management strategies available to investors.

Examining the effects of the US subprime crisis on the stock index futures markets integration, to the best of the authors' knowledge, goes clearly beyond the existing literature on the subject matter.