Long-only commodity index funds have been blamed by other futures market participants for inflating commodity prices, increasing market volatility, and distorting historical price relationships. Much of this criticism is leveled without any formal empirical support or even cursory data analyses....

Recent accusations against speculators in general and long-only commodity index funds inparticular, include: increasing market volatility, distorting historical price relationships, andfueling a rapid increase and decrease in commodity inflation. Some researchers have argued thatthese market...

It is commonly asserted that speculative buying by index funds in commodity futures andover–the–counter derivatives markets created a ‘‘bubble’’ in commodity prices, with the resultthat prices, and crude oil prices, in particular, far exceeded fundamental values at the peak.The...

Annual rebalancing of the S&P GSCI index provides a novel and strong identification to estimate the shape of supply curves for commodity futures contracts. Using the 24 commodities included in the S&P GSCI for 2004–2017, we show that cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) reach a peak of 59 basis...

Many believe that index fund investment was the main driver of the 2007-2008 spike in commodity futures prices. One group of empirical studies finds evidence that commodity index investment directly or indirectly had a substantial impact on commodity futures prices. However, the data and methods...