Inventories And The Short Run Dynamics Of Commodity Prices

Author : Ali Nouri Dariani
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (89 download)

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Download or read book Structural Modeling of Short-run Price Dynamics in Commodities Markets written by Ali Nouri Dariani and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation addresses the gap between commodity price models in economics and finance. The literature in finance often abstracts from market forces and calibrates a stochastic process of price dynamics in order to follow them closely and to price commodity derivatives, most importantly futures contracts. On the other hand models in economics literature often focus on supply, demand and inventories in the long-run. I have developed short-run structural models of commodity prices. These models provide a better description of price dynamics by considering the underlying structure of the economy. Since these models incorporate actions of market participants, they have the advantage of being able to process information signals about probabilities of future supply/demand shocks. The other advantage of short-run structural models is their power in prediction of unobservable states of the economy. Hence, these models provide a better description of forward curves in commodities markets. Recent advances in the theory of storage have been able to associate specific behaviors of commodity prices with inventory dynamics. These models assume producers and consumers who only consider current price, and storage units who consider the whole stochastic process of price in the future. This thesis improves upon these models in two aspects. First, I remove the assumption that the producers and consumers take into account only the current price. For depletable commodities specifically, and for many commodities in general, it is more plausible to assume that the producer has the option to sell the commodity now or postpone the extraction until a future time. The expected future dynamics of prices can change the current production decisions and as a result the current and future prices. My model characterizes the equilibrium of such a system and its comparative dynamics. Second, I introduce an advanced calibration algorithm for this model. Traditional models calibrate their parameters by minimizing their prediction error on aggregate measures such as the average volatility of forward prices. My approach considers the instances of forwards curves and tries to matches each of them. One advantage of this model is the ability to estimate the state of the system (e.g. remaining inventories) as well as the transient and permanent shocks in supply/demand. The theoretical framework of this dissertation shows that actions of rational market participants impose certain price dynamics to the market. Most examples in this work consider crude oil as it is the most traded commodity, with liquid future contracts for longer horizons. Calibration results demonstrate the improvements that short-run structural models could create in describing price dynamics.