Search results

This study aims to spot wheat data and disaggregated commitment of trader data for CME traded wheat futures to examine the effect of exogenous shocks for hedging positions of Producers and Swap Dealers on cash-futures basis and excess futures returns.

A Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) methodology is used to capture volatility transfer effects.

Evidence is presented that institutional short hedging positions play a major role in the pricing of asymmetric information held by Swap Dealers into the basis. The results also indicate that producer hedging contains information when conditions in the supply chain create a shift in long vs short hedging demand. Finally, the results demonstrate that that Swap Dealer short hedging has the greatest effect on risk premium size and historical volatility.

Various proxies for spot prices are used in the literature, although actual spot price data is not common. In addition, stationarity for basis and open interest data is induced using the Baxter-King filter which allows us to work with levels, rather than percentage changes, in the time series data. This provides the ability to directly observe the effect of outright open interest positions for hedgers on contemporaneous innovations in basis and in excess returns. The use of a BVAR methodology represents an improvement over other structural VAR models by capturing contemporaneous systemic effects within an endogeneity based structural framework.

This study uses a two‐step GARCH‐M procedure to observe mean‐return and volatility transmissions between Latin American markets and to Latin America from external markets during the period 1993–2000. The results indicate that mean‐return transmissions are common both within region and from external markets. The volatility transmission results are consistent with contagion theory and indicate that traders use both domestic news events as well as information contained by volatility in other markets in their information set.

This study examines empirically the characteristics of the two market indices developed by Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) and their related returns: the equally weighted index (EWI) and the value weighted index (VWI). The monthly‐prices for each index are obtained from ASE for the entire nine‐year period (1992‐2000) to compute market returns for both indices. The study period is divided into seven intervals of different lengths. The results of the test and the nonparametric (Wilcoxon) test indicate that the value weighted market return (VWR) tends to be significantly higher than the equally‐weighted market return (EWR). The variances of the two market returns tend to decrease as the length of the time intervals increases. Inconsistent with prior research findings, the differences between the two market returns variances failed to be significant at the 0.05 level. The study findings may have implications for capital market research that apply the market model in emerging markets, in general, and in ASE in particular.