This literature survey comprises 35 empirical studies published between 2010 and 2012 that analyze the influence of financial speculation on the markets for agricultural commodities. According to the current state of research, there is little supporting evidence that the recent increase in...

This article sketches an ethics of (financial) speculation in futures markets. (1) It identifies an intentionalistic fallacy prevalent in moral criticisms of speculation in general and of financial speculation in particular. (2) It scrutinizes the degree to which the recent debate on financial...

For quite some time long-only index funds have been suspected of being responsible for price increases in agricultural futures markets. This suspicion has prompted demands to drastically limit long-only index fundsʼ scope of activity. Such demands and their underlying diagnoses, however,...

International agricultural trade is key to improving global food security. It ensures access to more diversified foods (e.g. Krivonos and Kuhn 2019 ), acts as a safety net against local production shortfalls (Glauben et al. 2022) and helps make use of regional climatic or resource-related...

With the extension of the standard Melitz Model from Ahn et al. [2011], the important role of intermediaries in facilitating trade is now recognized. In this paper, we are going to expand Chaney's [2008] approach to an Intermediate Melitz Model. By researching if Chaney's results still apply for...

French (2011) can analytically show that the standard Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) gravity trade model is only correctly specified for disaggregate data; gravity trade model analysis should be done at product level and then estimation results should be reaggregated. If however gravity trade...

There has been an extensive discussion on the applicability of Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) to trade. Here, we are going to analyse again the performance of PPML but in the light of a bimodal distribution; in addition, we also explicitly account for excess zeros. Simulations are...

Substantial danger exists that politically prescribed market interventions, designed to counter a supposed failure of the markets, will leave markets functioning worse rather than better. This is particularly true of Eastern European transition countries, where institutional regulations function...