This thesis analyzes commodity futures pricing, trading activities in commodity futures contracts and their use for investment strategies. The aim of this thesis is to fill important gaps in the research field of commodity markets and to highlight special characteristics of commodity futures. It...

In credit risk management, migration or transition matrices are major inputs for risk management, Credit Value-at-Risk or derivative pricing. After reviewing distance measures for migration matrices we propose some new directed difference indices to measure changes in migration behavior in a...

Monthly dis-aggregated US data from 1978 to 2016 reveals that exposure to news on inflation and monetary policy helps to explain inflation expectations. This remains true when control- ling for household personal characteristics, perceptions of government policy effectiveness, future interest...

In credit risk management migration matrices are major inputs for many applications, including the determination of Value-at-Risk or derivative pricing. After reviewing distance measures for migration matrices we motivate and propose new directed difference indices to measure changes in...

We investigate the dynamic correlation between oil, gold and commodity currencies and suggest optimal hedging strategies for participants in these markets. Over the past few years, commodity prices have fluctuated significantly and exhibited high volatility. Although there are a number of...

An important issue in fitting stochastic models to electricity spot prices is the estimation of a component to deal with trends and seasonality in the data. Unfortunately, estimation routines for the long-term and short-term seasonal pattern are usually quite sensitive to extreme observations,...

Using a framework similar to Bekeart, Harvey and Ng (2005), we investigate contagion between real estate investment trusts (REITs) within and across three geographical regions: North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. We also examine for contagion between twelve national REIT markets on the one...

This paper applies different copulas in order to investigate the complex dependence structure between EU emission allowance (EUA) futures returns and those of other commodities, equity and energy indices. The analysis yields important insights into the relationship between carbon, commodities...

We provide an empirical analysis of the relationship between spot and futures prices in interconnected regional Australian electricity markets. Examining ex-post risk premiums in futures markets, we find positive and significant risk premiums for several of the considered regions. Therefore,...

In this paper, we attempt to identify risk factors for Asia-focused hedge funds through modified style analysis technique. Using an Asian hedge fund index, we find that Asian hedge funds show significant positive exposures to emerging equity markets, especially emerging markets in Asia, and also...