Booms and busts in commodity markets: bubbles or fundamentals?

This paper considers whether there were periodically collapsing rational speculative bubbles in commodity prices over a 40-year period from the late 1960s. We apply a switching regression approach to a broad range of commodities using two different measures of fundamental values—estimated from convenience yields and from a set of macroeconomic factors believed to affect commodity demand. We find reliable evidence for bubbles only among crude oil and feeder cattle, showing the popular belief that the extreme price movements observed in commodity markets were caused by pure speculation to be unsustainabl

Monitoring the green transition in the power sector with the electricity generation emissions (EGE) tracker

This paper introduces the Electricity Generation Emissions (EGE) tracker as a new indicator for measuring the decarbonization process associated with the electricity generation mix. The EGE is a composite indicator calculated at the cross-country level on the basis of electricity production of different generation technologies weighted by their corresponding life cycle emission factors. In addition, a four-step methodology is proposed to monitor the energy transition rigorously. It combines index construction and decomposition with the application of machine learning and visualization techniques in a cross-country cluster analysis and temporal mapping. EGE tracker provides a benchmark for comparing countries' sustainability performance in the electricity generation process and quantifies the effectiveness of their climate policies. The design of the index offers a novel measurement to analyze the contribution of each technology to emission reduction.The application of EGE tracker and the proposed methodology reveals a highly heterogeneous emissions reduction trend across the OECD, indicating that the process of moving away from fossil fuels varies by country and evidences different effectiveness in their climate policies. Moreover, our study highlights the potential for better utilization of renewables and the optimization of sustainable energy mix combinations, paving the way for a cleaner, greener energy future

Has futures trading affected the volatility of aluminium transactions prices?

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:6392.9265(no 432) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Price variability and marketing method in the non-ferrous metals industry

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:6392.9265(no 431) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Prices and production cost in aluminium smelting in the short and the long run

The main objective of this study is to reflect the institutional changes that have characterized the aluminium industry as a result of the introduction of London's Metal Exchange (LME) trading. In doing this, it is shown that product prices are taken exogenously and linked to input prices via risk sharing agreements. This forces producers, in a competitive environment, to minimize costs. The latter is completed with a description of their investment decision-making mechanism, in which investment is determined by cost, and a measure of Tobin's q. The main contributions of this study are: the use of a proprietary and complete industry data set that allows one (a) to set up the short run input and output price relationships; (b) to model the optimizing behaviour of the sector via a flexible cost function (translog) allowing scale economies and non-constant factor substitution; and (c) to describe the investment-process that has emerged with the introduction of LME trading.