In this chapter, we highlight some important aspects of biofuels development and policies from partial and general equilibrium perspectives. We first examine US biofuel policy backgrounds to determine factors which caused the boom in the ethanol industry in recent years. Then, we use a partial equilibrium model to investigate the economic consequences of further expansion in the ethanol industr...

This paper evaluates the weak-form efficiency of the crude oil markets using the artificial neural network (ANN) model. Based on the daily historical data of the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil spot price over the period (02 January 198631 December 2013), the model was trained using backpropagation algorithm. The output of the neural network represents the predicted prices which are con...

This paper proposes a profit model for spread trading by focusing on the stochastic movement of the price spread and its first hitting time probability density. The model is general in that it can be used for any financial instrument. The advantage of the model is that the profit from the trades can be easily calculated if the first hitting time probability density of the stochastic process is ...

In this paper we examine whether WTI and Brent crude oil spot and futures prices (at one, three and six months to maturity) contain a unit root with one and two structural breaks, employing weekly data over the period 1991-2004. To realize this objective we employ Lagrange Multiplier (LM) unit root tests with one and two endogenous structural breaks proposed by Lee and Stazicich (2003, 2004). W...

After a four-year period during which crude oil was trading at an average of $115/bl (Baffes et al, 2015), prices started to plummet in June 2014, raising immediate concerns about the resilience of energy transition processes. At that time, some argued that the expansion of clean energy solutions would not be derailed, referring inter alia to the cyclical nature of oil prices; because a swift r...