Recently various exchange rate models capturing the dynamics during the transition from an exchange rate arrangement of floating rates into a currency union have been derived. Technically, these stochastic equilibrium models are diffusion processes which have to be estimated by discretely...

Motivated by repeated price spikes and crashes over the last decade, we investigate whether the rapidly growing market shares of futures speculators have destabilized commodity spot prices. We approximate conditional volatility and regress it on expected and unexpected speculative open interest....