Motivated by repeated price spikes and crashes over the last decade, we investigate whether the intensive investment activities of commodity index traders (CITs) has destabilized agricultural futures markets. Using a stochastic volatility model, we treat conditional volatility as an unobserved...

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....