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The Financialization of Food?

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  • Valentina G. Bruno
  • Bahattin Büyükşahin
  • Michel A. Robe

Abstract

Commodity-equity return co-movements rose dramatically during the Great Recession. This development took place following what has been dubbed the “financialization” of commodity markets. We first document changes since 1995 in the relative importance of financial institutions’ activity in agricultural futures markets. We then use a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model to ascertain the role of that activity in explaining correlations between weekly grain, livestock, and equity returns from 1995–2015. We provide robust evidence that, accounting for shocks that are idiosyncratic to agricultural markets, world business cycle shocks have a substantial and long-lasting impact on the latter’s co-movements with financial markets. In contrast, changes in the intensity of financial speculation have an impact on cross-market return linkages that is shorter-lived and not statistically significant in all model specifications.

Suggested Citation

  • Valentina G. Bruno & Bahattin Büyükşahin & Michel A. Robe, 2017. "The Financialization of Food?," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 99(1), pages 243-264.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:99:y:2017:i:1:p:243-264.
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    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aaw059
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Financialization; fundamentals; grains; livestock; equities;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G13 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Contingent Pricing; Futures Pricing
    • Q11 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Aggregate Supply and Demand Analysis; Prices
    • Q13 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Agricultural Markets and Marketing; Cooperatives; Agribusiness

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