Samuelson Hypothesis & Indian Commodity Derivatives Market

Saurabh Gupta () and Prabina Rajib ()

Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, 2012, vol. 19, issue 4, 352 pages

Abstract: Samuelson ( 1965 ) devised that futures price volatility increases as the futures contract approaches its expiration. The relation amid the volatility and time to maturity has significant inference for hedging strategies. Interestingly, so far the empirical evidence in favor of the Samuelson Hypothesis (maturity effect) is mixed in various markets. Considering no significant work to examine the relationship is so far carried out in commodity derivative markets of India, this paper ordeal the Samuelson Hypothesis on 8 commodities traded on Multi-Commodity Exchange (MCX), India. We have examined the issue by applying different regression techniques to test the hypothesis for 8 commodities (Aluminium, Nickel, Copper, Gold, Silver, Natural Gas, Crude Oil and Wheat) using inter-day data on MCX India. In order to test the Samuelson’s hypothesis, tests have been conducted using a series of GARCH, EGARCH and TGARCH models by including trading volume, open interest and time-to-maturity in the conditional variance equation. From our results, it is concluded that Samuelson’s hypothesis does not hold true for majority of commodity contracts considered. Our results also find that volatility series depend on the trading volume, compared to the time-to-maturity or open interest. As Samuelson hypothesis does not hold true for majority of commodity contracts, traders in Indian commodity derivative markets should not bias their decisions solely based on the time-to-maturity, but should also consider trading volume and open interest as they are an important determinant of price volatility. They should also consider the possibility of leverage effect while predicting future price volatilities, and the associated margin requirements. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2012

Keywords: Samuelson hypothesis; Maturity effect; Volatility modeling; GARCH; Indian commodity derivatives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10690-012-9152-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:apfinm:v:19:y:2012:i:4:p:331-352

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/finance/journal/10690/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10690-012-9152-1

Access Statistics for this article

Asia-Pacific Financial Markets is currently edited by Jiro Akahori

More articles in Asia-Pacific Financial Markets from Springer, Japanese Association of Financial Economics and Engineering
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().