2 minutes read

A selection of papers presented at the International Workshop on "Financial Speculation in the Oil Market and the Determinants of the Oil Price" organized by FEEM on January 12-13, 2012  will be published in a Special Issue of The Energy Journal, 2013, Vol. 34, No. 3.

The aim of the issue is to provide readers with a broad and updated research perspective on financial speculation in the oil markets. Scroll the Energy section of FEEM’s e-journal Re3 for the articles and interviews on this topic published shortly after the conference.

 

***

Introduction to a Special Issue of The Energy Journal on “Financial Speculation in the Oil Markets and the Determinants of the Oil Price”

The increased financialization of oil futures markets in the last decades has led to allegations that speculators drive crude oil prices, and are thus supposedly responsible for recent increases in the crude oil price and its volatility.

Given the bad reputation that financial speculation has among public opinion and politicians, it is crucial that current economic research provide the answers to relevant issues, such as: the definition, measurement and role of financial speculation in the oil and commodity derivatives markets; the impact of speculation on spot and futures oil prices, and on oil price volatility; the determinants of the oil price; the transmission mechanisms through which structural macroeconomic shocks affect the oil price; the effects of oil price shocks on the global economy; the effects of speculative shocks on the oil price.

The special issue of The Energy Journal on “Financial Speculation in the Oil Markets and the Determinants of the Oil Price”, edited by Matteo Manera, collects a selection of papers presented at the workshop organized by the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) in Milan on January 12-13, 2012, as well as a number of contributions, which have been submitted with the aim of providing the reader with a broad and updated research perspective on financial speculation in the oil markets.

Although many of the research questions answered by the contributions to this special issue are intertwined, nevertheless it can be useful to classify each paper with respect to one of the following three groups of topics: the definition of financial speculation and the role that financial speculation has in explaining oil prices; the empirical relevance that specific measures of financial speculation have in explaining oil price returns, oil price volatility and oil price spreads; the relationship between oil prices, oil price returns and oil price volatility and the macroeconomy.

References
Manera, M. (2013). “Introduction” The Energy Journal 34 (3): 1-5. http://dx.doi.org/10.5547/01956574.34.3.1

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei