As commodity markets have continued their expansion an extensive and complex financial industry has developed to service them. This industry includes hundreds of participating firms, including asset managers, brokers, consultants, verification agencies and a myriad of other institutions....

This article questions the empirical usefulness of leverage effects to describe the dynamics of equity returns. Relying on both in and out of sample tests we consistently find a weak contribution of leverage effects over the past 25 years of S&P 500 returns. The skewness in the conditional...

This chapter aims to build a connection between commodities' price movements and the growth level in industrial production in different economic regions. Commodities should only be incorporated in a diversified strategy as long they either have a poor correlation to standard assets such as...

In investment-decision-making, it is customary to define economic regimes of high or low realized risk premiums with economic indicators such as inflation and growth. We generalize this discrete categorization to a continuous one by estimating a linear relation between economic fundamentals and...

We introduce a new meaure of risk appetite in financial markets, based on the cross sectional behavior of excess returns. Turning them into probabilities through a Markov Switching model, we define one global risk appetite measure as the cross-sectional average of the individual probabilities...