Three Essays On Price Discovery In The Cotton Futures Market

Recent booms and busts in commodity prices have placed renewed scrutiny on commodity futures markets as a mechanism for price discovery, the process of incorporating new information about the relative scarcity of the commodity into prices. Such concerns are not new; there has been some distrust of futures market price discovery since the inception of these markets. As these markets evolve, new market participants and institutions may influence price discovery. Using the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) cotton futures market as a laboratory, I consider three such forces potentially responsible for poor price discovery during the 2007-2011 period of volatile cotton prices. These are financial speculation, electronic trading, and funding constraints on commercial hedgers. In Chapter 1, I study whether the increased presence of financial firms, particularly commodity index traders, drives cotton futures prices away from the levels implied by supply and demand under rational expectations. I estimate a structural vector autoregression model of the cotton futures market. My model develops a new method to point identify shocks to precautionary demand for cotton separately from shocks to current supply and demand and separately identifies the effects of two types of speculation: precautionary demand for the commodity and financial speculation. I show empirically that most cotton price variation stems from contemporaneous unanticipated shocks to current cotton supply and demand. However, the 2008 price spike came from an increase in precautionary demand due to projections of lower future production. I find no evidence in support of claims that financial speculation causes commodity booms and busts.Chapter 2 considers the introduction of electronic trading to the cotton futures market across three periods of floor trade, parallel floor and electronic trade, and electronic-only trade. I statistically decompose intraday variation in cotton prices into a component related to information about market fundamentals and a ''pricing error'' caused by frictions in the trading mechanism. Better market quality or price discovery is characterized by lower variance of the pricing error. Unlike previous studies of floor and electronic trading, I consider more than average measures of market quality. I calculate statistics for market quality for each trading day, and study their trend, variance, persistence, and relationship to other variables related to price discovery. I find that market quality improved, but became more variable under electronic trading. This relationship between electronic trading and market quality is robust to controls for changes over time in the number of trades, trading volume, and price volatility.My final chapter considers the role of funding constraints in exacerbating futures price spikes. I review the experience of commercial hedgers during the 2008 cotton futures price spike. In this period, commercial hedgers without access to credit were forced to close futures positions in an illiquid market. Losses incurred on these trades led some firms to exit the cotton merchandising business. I use facts from the cotton case to develop a dynamic model of futures market equilibrium in the short-run for cases where funding constraints for some hedging firms bind and do not bind. Analytical results show that observed futures price volatility can be explained by the relation between funding liquidity of trading firms and market liquidity. This relationship alters the trading behavior of hedgers and results in diminished price discovery.