Hedging effectiveness of European wheat futures markets

Abstract

The instability of commodity prices and the hypothesis that speculative behaviour was one of its causes has brought renewed interest in futures markets. In this paper, the hedging effectiveness of European and US wheat futures markets were studied to test whether they were affected by the high price instability after 2007. Implicitly, this is a test of whether the increasing presence of speculation in futures markets have made them divorced from the physical markets. A multivariate GARCH model was applied to compute optimal hedging ratios. No important evidence was found of a change in the effectiveness of hedging after 2007.