Files
Abstract
The dramatic rise in commodity index investment have made many market analysts and researchers believe that commodity markets have undergone a financialization process that forged a closer link between commodity and financial markets. I empirically test whether this hypothesis is true in a forecasting context by using high-frequency financial data to forecast monthly US corn prices. Specific financial series examined include the Baltic Dry Index, the US exchange rate, the Standard and Poor’s 500 market index, the 3-month US Treasury bill interest rate, and crude oil futures prices. Using a recently developed statistical model that deals with mixed-frequency data, I find that while some improvements may be made when including high-frequency financial data in the forecasting model, the improvements in mean-squared prediction error and directional accuracy using such models are minimal, and that models generated from random walk and autoregressive models perform satisfactory well compared to more complicated models.