IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/4083.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Present Value Model of Rational Commodity Pricing

Author

Listed:
  • Robert S. Pindyck

Abstract

The present value model relates an asset's price to the sum of its discounted expected future payoffs. I explore the limits of the model by testing its ability to explain the pricing of storable commodities. For commodities the payoff stream is the convenience yield that accrues from holding inventories, and it can be measured directly from spot and futures prices. Hence the model imposes restrictions on the joint dynamics of spot and futures prices, which I test for four commodities. I find close conformance to the model for heating oil, but not for copper or lumber, and especially not for gold. The pattern is the same for the serial dependence of excess returns, These results suggest that for three of the four commodities, prices at least temporarily deviate from fundamentals.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert S. Pindyck, 1992. "The Present Value Model of Rational Commodity Pricing," NBER Working Papers 4083, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4083
    Note: AP
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w4083.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robert S. Pindyck & Julio J. Rotemberg, 1993. "The Comovement of Stock Prices," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 108(4), pages 1073-1104.
    2. repec:crs:wpaper:8909 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. N. Gregory Mankiw & David Romer & Matthew D. Shapiro, 1991. "Stock Market Forecastability and Volatility: A Statistical Appraisal," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 58(3), pages 455-477.
    4. Angus Deaton & Guy Laroque, 1992. "On the Behaviour of Commodity Prices," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 59(1), pages 1-23.
    5. James A. Kahn, 1992. "Why is Production More Volatile than Sales? Theory and Evidence on the Stockout-Avoidance Motive for Inventory-Holding," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 107(2), pages 481-510.
    6. John Y. Campbell, Robert J. Shiller, 1988. "The Dividend-Price Ratio and Expectations of Future Dividends and Discount Factors," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 1(3), pages 195-228.
    7. French, Kenneth R., 1983. "A comparison of futures and forward prices," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 311-342, November.
    8. Robert S. Pindyck, 1994. "Inventories and the Short-Run Dynamics of Commodity Prices," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 25(1), pages 141-159, Spring.
    9. Campbell, John Y & Shiller, Robert J, 1987. "Cointegration and Tests of Present Value Models," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 95(5), pages 1062-1088, October.
    10. James G. MacKinnon, 1990. "Critical Values for Cointegration Tests," Working Paper 1227, Economics Department, Queen's University.
    11. David M. Cutler & James M. Poterba & Lawrence H. Summers, 1991. "Speculative Dynamics," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 58(3), pages 529-546.
    12. Fama, Eugene F & French, Kenneth R, 1988. " Business Cycles and the Behavior of Metals Prices," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 43(5), pages 1075-1093, December.
    13. repec:hoo:wpaper:91-7 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Cox, John C. & Ingersoll, Jonathan Jr. & Ross, Stephen A., 1981. "The relation between forward prices and futures prices," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 9(4), pages 321-346, December.
    15. Dusak, Katherine, 1973. "Futures Trading and Investor Returns: An Investigation of Commodity Market Risk Premiums," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(6), pages 1387-1406, Nov.-Dec..
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Björn Lutz, 2010. "Pricing of Derivatives on Mean-Reverting Assets," Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, Springer, number 978-3-642-02909-7, December.
    2. Campbell, John Y & Ammer, John, 1993. "What Moves the Stock and Bond Markets? A Variance Decomposition for Long-Term Asset Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(1), pages 3-37, March.
    3. Tim Bollerslev & Robert J. Hodrick, 1992. "Financial Market Efficiency Tests," NBER Working Papers 4108, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2017. "Asset prices and macroeconomic outcomes: a survey," BIS Working Papers 676, Bank for International Settlements.
    5. Liu, Peng & Tang, Ke, 2011. "The stochastic behavior of commodity prices with heteroskedasticity in the convenience yield," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 211-224, March.
    6. Owen Q. Wu & Hong Chen, 2010. "Optimal Control and Equilibrium Behavior of Production-Inventory Systems," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 56(8), pages 1362-1379, August.
    7. Symeonidis, Lazaros & Prokopczuk, Marcel & Brooks, Chris & Lazar, Emese, 2012. "Futures basis, inventory and commodity price volatility: An empirical analysis," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 29(6), pages 2651-2663.
    8. Baur, Robert Frederick, 1992. "Overreaction in futures markets," ISU General Staff Papers 1992010108000010973, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    9. Considine, Jennifer & Galkin, Philipp & Aldayel, Abdullah, 2022. "Inventories and the term structure of oil prices: A complex relationship," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    10. Leonardo Becchetti & Roberto Rocci & Giovanni Trovato, 2007. "Industry and time specific deviations from fundamental values in a random coefficient model," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 3(2), pages 257-276, March.
    11. Liu, Peng (Peter) & Tang, Ke, 2010. "No-arbitrage conditions for storable commodities and the modeling of futures term structures," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(7), pages 1675-1687, July.
    12. Nikolaos Mitianoudis & Theologos Dergiades, 2016. "Stock Prices Predictability at Long-horizons: Two Tales from the Time-Frequency Domain," Discussion Paper Series 2016_04, Department of Economics, University of Macedonia, revised Dec 2016.
    13. Ron Alquist & Lutz Kilian, 2010. "What do we learn from the price of crude oil futures?," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(4), pages 539-573.
    14. Robert S. Pindyck, 1994. "Inventories and the Short-Run Dynamics of Commodity Prices," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 25(1), pages 141-159, Spring.
    15. Gary B. Gorton & Fumio Hayashi & K. Geert Rouwenhorst, 2013. "The Fundamentals of Commodity Futures Returns," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 17(1), pages 35-105.
    16. Serena Ng & Francisco J. Ruge-Murcia, 2000. "Explaining the Persistence of Commodity Prices," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 16(1/2), pages 149-171, October.
    17. repec:zbw:bofism:2006_035 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Taipalus, Katja, 2012. "Detecting asset price bubbles with time-series methods," Scientific Monographs, Bank of Finland, number 2012_047.
    19. Taipalus, Katja, 2006. "Bubbles in the Finnish and US equities markets," Bank of Finland Scientific Monographs, Bank of Finland, volume 0, number sm2006_035.
    20. Kilian, Lutz, 1999. "Exchange Rates and Monetary Fundamentals: What Do We Learn from Long-Horizon Regressions?," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 14(5), pages 491-510, Sept.-Oct.
    21. Hélyette Geman & Vu-Nhat Nguyen, 2005. "Soybean Inventory and Forward Curve Dynamics," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 51(7), pages 1076-1091, July.

    More about this item

    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

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4083. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.