Risk Premia in Crude Oil Futures Prices

No 19056, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: If commercial producers or financial investors use futures contracts to hedge against commodity price risk, the arbitrageurs who take the other side of the contracts may receive compensation for their assumption of nondiversifiable risk in the form of positive expected returns from their positions. We show that this interaction can produce an affine factor structure to commodity futures prices, and develop new algorithms for estimation of such models using unbalanced data sets in which the duration of observed contracts changes with each observation. We document significant changes in oil futures risk premia since 2005, with the compensation to the long position smaller on average in more recent data. This observation is consistent with the claim that index-fund investing has become more important relative to commerical hedging in determining the structure of crude oil futures risk premia over time.

JEL-codes: G13 G23 Q14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-upt
Note: AP EEE ME
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published as Hamilton, James D. & Wu, Jing Cynthia, 2014. "Risk premia in crude oil futures prices," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 9-37.

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Journal Article: Risk premia in crude oil futures prices (2014)
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