Three Essays On Futures Markets

Author : Pavel Teterin
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 162 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (18 download)

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Download or read book Three Essays on Volatility and Information Content of Futures Markets written by Pavel Teterin and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation includes three essays on volatility and information content of futures markets. This work gives new insight into the structural changes in volatility, the information content of global interest rate futures, and the time-series behavior of the volatility term structure. The first essay examines structural volatility shifts U.S. crude oil and corn futures markets. In trying to capture the interrelations present in the two markets, we take seriously the importance of properly modelling smooth structural shifts. We incorporate trigonometric functions into a multivariate GARCH model of crude and corn futures prices to obtain the empirical volatility response functions and the time-varying correlation coefficient. Although both short-term and long-term futures exhibit shifts in the mean and volatility, volatility shifts do not manifest themselves in the same manner for different maturities. In the second essay, we investigate the term structure of interest rate futures in the US, Eurozone, United Kingdom, and Switzerland and empirically document five unique results. First, implied USD futures rates contain significantly different information compared to USD spot rates. Second, the four interest rate futures contracts contain similar information that is driven by one common component. Third, implied futures rates contain more information regarding future rate changes than return premiums. Fourth, information shifts are associated with macroeconomic conditions and central bank policies. Finally, significant information shifts occurred during the 2013-2015 time frame, which were greater than those of the great recessionary period of 2008-2009. The third essay focuses on the Samuelson hypothesis, a proposition that futures volatility declines with maturity. We study the strength of the Samuelson effect over time in ten most actively traded U.S. commodity futures. Capturing the dynamics of the futures volatility term structure with three factors, we show that in most markets the slope factor is strongly negative in certain periods and only weakly or not at all negative in other periods. Consistent with the linkage between carry arbitrage and the Samuelson hypothesis, we find that high inventory levels correspond to a flatter volatility term structure. We also find that a flatter volatility term structure corresponds to lower absolute futures term premiums.