Impact of speculation and economic uncertainty on commodity markets

Pierre Andreasson, Stelios Bekiros, Duc Khuong Nguyen and Gazi Uddin

International Review of Financial Analysis, 2016, vol. 43, issue C, 115-127

Abstract: We examine the interactions between commodity futures returns and five driving factors (financial speculation, exchange rate, stock market dynamics, implied volatility for the US equity market, and economic policy uncertainty). Nonlinear causality tests are implemented after controlling for cointegration and conditional heteroscedasticity in the data over the period May 1990 – April 2014. Our results show strong evidence of unidirectional linear causality from commodity returns to excess speculation for the majority of the considered commodities, in particular for agriculture commodities. This evidence casts doubt on the claim that speculation is driving food prices. We also find unidirectional linear causality from energy futures markets to exchange rates and strong evidence of nonlinear causal dependence between commodity futures returns, on the one hand, and stock market returns and implied volatility, on the other hand. Overall, the new evidence found in this paper can be utilized for policy and investment decision-making.

Keywords: Commodity markets; Economic uncertainty; Nonlinear causality; Step-wise filtering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C32 C51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (94)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finana:v:43:y:2016:i:c:p:115-127

DOI: 10.1016/j.irfa.2015.11.005

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