Many studies conclude that the rise in global food prices due to higher demand from the development of biofuels, climate anomalies, and increased of oil prices. Not only the food commodity index rose more than 60 percent, nonfood commodity price index also rose over 60 percent and crude oil price index has increased even further above 60 percent. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impa...

Last month, oil prices reached uS$100 per barrel for the second time—the first time was in late 2007. Just a few weeks before, in early December, most representatives at the united Nations’ climate change conference in Bali pledged to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide further, and set new targets and limits to be implemented when the Kyoto protocol ends in 2012. caught between rising prices of...

The increase in energy prices that followed Hurricane Katrina restored energy trading to front-page news. Ever since, oil and natural gas prices have repeatedly set all-time record highs. This spring, oil was again trading above US $70 a barrel, having fallen as low as US $30 as late as January 2004. Increases for natural gas have been even more spectacular, from US $3.10 per MMBtu (million Bri...

This paper develops an efficiency-wage model where input prices affect the equilibrium rate of unemployment. We show that a simple framework based on only two prices (the real price of oil and the real rate of interest) is able to explain the main post-war movements in the rate of U.S. joblessness. The equations do well in forecasting unemployment many years out-of-sample, and provide evidence ...

WHEN THE U.S. INVADED Iraq in March 2003, many economists feared that the war would lead to a sharp decline in Iraqi oil production, a spike in oil prices, and a woeful U.S. economy that would follow the scripts of the oil shocks of 1973, 1978, and 1990. Real oil prices did increase, indeed more than tripled, from $20 in 2001:Q4 to $62 in 2006:Q3 (in 2007 dollars). But the ailments associated w...

The goals of the paper are as follows: i) review some qualitative properties of oil and gas prices in the last 15 years; ii) propose some mathematical elements towards a definition of mean reversion that would not be reduced to the form of the drift in a stochastic differential equation; iii) conduct econometric tests in order to conclude whether mean reversion still exists in the energy commod...

Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the presence of sufficiently stochastic prices, oil extracting firms have an incentive to hold inventories to ...

This paper examines volatility transmission in oil, ethanol and corn prices in the United States between 1997 and 2011. We follow a multivariate GARCH approach to evaluate the level of interdependence and the dynamics of volatility across these markets. Preliminary results indicate a higher interaction between ethanol and corn markets in recent years, particularly after 2006. We only observe, h...

This study investigates the optimal switching boundary to a renewable fuel when oil prices exhibit continuous random fluctuations along with occasional discontinuous jumps. In this paper, oil prices are modeled to follow jump diffusion processes. A completeness result is derived. Given that the market is complete the value of a contingent claim is risk neutral expectation of the discounted pay ...