Further Evidence on the Explanatory Power of Spot Food and Energy Prices for Futures Contracts Prices

This research is focused on the “reverse” relationships between spot and futures markets with particular attention given to the interrelationships between markets for food commodities and energy. The study is interesting for reasons of economics and political science particularly as concerns “oil for food” agreements. Acknowledging the many empirical tests of efficient markets, this study lends insight into the empirical validity of reverse regressions hypothesizing that spot prices today contain information useful for predicting forward rates in the future. This paper analyzes the possible relationship between selected futures prices and spot oil prices considering the importance of the effects of temporal aggregation as well as alternative model specifications and assumptions on the distributions of residuals. In addition to the assumption of normality, the paper considers use of a fat-tailed distribution (multivariate t-distribution) to examine the robustness of results that are based on the normality assumption. Finally, models are compared in terms of ex post predictive validity.