This paper examines the dynamic relationships between speculative activities, commodity returns, and macroeconomic conditions across five sectors compassing 29 commodities. Using weekly data spanning from January 2000 to July 2023, we construct comprehensive measures of commodity market...

Situated atop condominium buildings, 'top floor units' (TFU) offer unparalleled views and privacy, courtesy of accessible roofs. This paper empirically examines this status symbol and finds that: (1) TFUs interact with the macroeconomy differently from ordinary units, (2) when considering the...

This paper aims to assess the role of expectations as a determinant of the real price of natural gas. To measure expectations-driven speculative demand three approaches are followed, which are based respectively on using natural gas inventories consistently with the theory of storage (Kilian and...

In this study, we investigate the dynamic relationship between return and liquidity in the Brent and the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil markets. The research utilises daily oil price and volume data and monthly macroeconomic data from January 1, 1996 to April 28, 2023 obtained from the Energy...

The present study investigates the relationship between innovation (INN) and foreign direct investment (FDI) attraction across 66 developing countries from 2013 to 2021. Adopting the Difference Generalized Method of Moments estimation, the study reveals a statistically positive INN-FDI nexus....

This article reviews Paul Crosthwaite's Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis (2024) and Liliana Doganova's Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (2024), situating them within recent scholarship on a future-oriented, speculative, and economic...

This paper examines the relationship between trading activity and returns volatility in white maize futures listed on the South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX) and investigates the impact of speculative activity on volatility. Returns volatility is estimated using a GARCH (1,1) model. Trading...

Discussions on "profit inflation" are mired in conceptual unclarities, definitional idiosyncrasies and data problems. This article attempts to bring conceptual clarity to the debate on profit inflation, defining profit inflation strictly as an increase in the gross output price that is caused by...

What began with an intense bout of crypto fever has since the onset of the pandemic engendered an explosive rise in online retail trading. While the original political promise of financial decentralization has become ever harder to sustain, the idea of democracy as access, including access to...

The interface of political economy with arts and literature has become dominated by a particular image: capital's Grinch-like theft of the future. But this image overlooks the peculiar temporal structure of neoliberalism, which renews its broken promises by making up ever more excuses for the...

Bitcoin Pricing Kernels (PKs) are estimated using a novel data set from Deribit, the leading Bitcoin options exchange. The PKs, as the ratio between risk-neutral and physical density, dynamically reflect the change in investor preferences. Thus, the PKs improve the understanding of investor...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many new individual investors globally entered the stock markets, often pursuing speculative investment strategies that resemble gambling. A concern is that trading as a form of gambling can become addictive for some people, as documented by several recent studies...

On the 30th anniversary of the seminal article by Pindyck (1993), we re-evaluate the evidence for the classical rational model of commodity prices, extending it to admit time- varying discount rates, investors’ heterogeneity or both. Discount factors specifications are flexible enough to allow...

We develop a deep reinforcement learning (RL) framework for an optimal market-making (MM) trading problem, specifically focusing on price processes with semi-Markov and Hawkes Jump-Diffusion dynamics. We begin by discussing the basics of RL and the deep RL framework used; we deployed the...

We construct a model of bubbles where an asset can be used as collateral primarily due to higher-order uncertainty: while both a lender and a borrower know that the intrinsic value of the asset is low, they may still believe that a “greater fool” exists who will purchase it at a much higher...

Aus der wirtschaftsethischen Perspektive des ordonomischen Forschungsprogramms leistet dieser Artikel drei Beiträge zur aktuellen Debatte um zivilgesellschaftliche Vorwürfen, dass die Terminmarktgeschäfte von Agrarspekulanten Hungerkrisen hervorbringen oder verschärfen. Erstens erläutert er...

Aus der wirtschaftsethischen Perspektive des ordonomischen Forschungsprogramms leistet dieser Artikel drei Beiträge zur aktuellen Debatte um zivilgesellschaftliche Vorwürfen, dass die Terminmarktgeschäfte von Agrarspekulanten Hungerkrisen hervorbringen oder verschärfen. Erstens erläutert er...

We present a weekly structural Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model of the US crude oil market. Exploiting weekly data we can explain short-run crude oil price dynamics, including those related with the COVID-19 pandemic and with the Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The model is set identified with a...

This paper aims to propose reforms to develop the Islamic derivatives transactions in Indonesia's over-the-counter (OTC) market. It is argued that the use of derivatives instruments is considered non-sharia compliant by the National Sharia Board (NSB) of the Indonesian Council of Ulama. However,...

This paper aims to assess the role of expectations as a determinant of the real price of natural gas. To measure expectations-driven speculative demand three approaches are followed, which are based respectively on using natural gas inventories consistently with the theory of storage (Kilian and...

Situated atop condominium buildings, 'top floor units' (TFU) offer unparalleled views and privacy, courtesy of accessible roofs. This paper empirically examines this status symbol and finds that: (1) TFUs interact with the macroeconomy differently from ordinary units, (2) when considering the...

Despite widespread academic and practitioner interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a form of digital assets, little is known about how consumers perceive NFT value. This exploratory research investigates why people create, trade or collect NFTs, what value they derive from them, and how...

This paper employs the opening of the first international telegraph between London and Paris on 13 November 1851 as a unique event that enabled a virtually instantaneous information exchange between the largest financial centers. Before this opening, a London currency speculator comparing the...

The objective of the study is to explore the motives of investors to invest in derivative markets. It is a quantitative study where a survey method was used to collect data from the investors using a probability sampling method. The data was analyzed using PLS-SEM to test the conceptual model....

This study investigates whether investors' overreactions to blockchain-related announcements is driven by corporate executive opportunism in the Chinese capital market. We manually collect blockchain-related announcements made by Chinese listed firms over 2016–2022 and conduct an event study...

The inflation surge in recent years is having profound social, economic, and political consequences. With food price changes being an integral part of inflation, low income segments of the population are strongly impacted. What makes this period so unusual is the breadth of price pressures that...

Higher order beliefs - beliefs about others' beliefs - may be important for trading behaviour and asset prices, but have received little systematic empirical examination. We study more than twenty years of evidence from the Robert Shiller Investor Confidence surveys, which directly elicit...