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Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a highly nascent and emerging phenomenon revolutionizing how digital assets are traded. NFTs embody immutable rights to unique digital assets such as digital art and collectibles, and are represented as digital tokens that can be traded across marketplaces utilizing blockchain technologies. NFTs engender new ways to organize, consume, move, program, and store digital information, and have experienced a rapid rise in various adaptations across art, sport, broadcasting, content creation, and tech-crypto business. This paper explains what NFTs are, how they fit with blockchain and cryptocurrencies, how they are used by various industries, and what opportunities and risks they present. Our key contribution is to conceptually map an initial NFT ecosystem. In doing so, we provide relational mapping between and among key stakeholders including content creators, core and related technical and business intermediaries, consumers, investors and speculators. Further, the paper highlights implications for managers and ties them to conceptual exploration and exploitation frameworks. We also provide limitations and prescient understanding about the likely trajectories for NFTs.

This paper tests the speculative trading in Bitcoin Brazilian market using daily data for Bitcoin spanning the 2011–2018 sample period. Two points are examined: the first is based in stylized facts about price dynamics on Brazilian market and the second implies in testing the hypothesis that speculative trading in Bitcon is resposible for its unusual volatility level. We check the existence of speculative trading in the Brazilian market based on three different experiments, broadly relevant to both market participants and academic researchers. Our results are summarized as follows: (i) The Bitcoin's bull on Brazilian market presented short duration, given the volatility exposed into period, showing signs of asymmetry in marketinformation and uncertainty; (ii) It was observed the different trajectories between volatilityand return, reflecting the high degree of speculation of the market; (iii). It was proved the ex-istence of speculative trading in Bitcoin's Brazilian market through three different experiments

To explore how speculative trading influences prices in financial markets, we conduct a laboratory market experiment with speculating investors (who do not collect dividends and trade only for capital gains) and dividend-collecting investors. Moreover, we operate markets at two different levels of money supply. We find that in phases with only speculating investors present (i) price deviations from fundamentals are larger; (ii) prices are more volatile; (iii) mispricing increases with the number of transfers until maturity; and (iv) speculative trading pushes prices upward (downward) when the supply of money is high (low). These results suggest that controlling the money supply can help to stabilize asset prices.

The real estate market in China is often subject to government intervention while it is widely believed that speculation is one of the driving force for the dramatic increase in house price. By controlling macroeconomic factors, we detect two types of speculative traders, fundamentalists and chartists, respectively. Fundamentalists rely on fundamental value for trading while chartists hold a momentum expectation. We further assess the effects of government intervention policies on house price and speculation. The tightening policy cools down while the stimulating policy enhances the speculation. The contrasting effects of different policies on speculations indicate the challenge in handling the Chinese housing market.

This paper examines the political ecology of onions in India, one of the largest producer countries in the world. Although the cost of producing onions is significant, an increasing number of farmers are drawn to its cultivation. Onion prices are, however, highly volatile, fluctuating wildly within the span of a few days, making it a notorious gamble on the market. As a kitchen staple and the second highest consumed vegetable in India, it is also a politically significant crop – high retail rates are held responsible for the fall of governments, and are met with price controls, storage limits, and export restrictions. Yet, in the expectation of spectacular gains, farmers try their luck with its cultivation, investing in inputs, storing and sorting, hoping and waiting for the perfect time to sell. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the Malwa region of western Madhya Pradesh, I consider how the specific socio-ecological qualities of onion cultivation, harvesting and storage – from high yields to limited storability and the seasonality of cultivation – shape its speculative possibilities. This research finds that it is largely privileged classes and castes of farmers who have access to the ‘means of speculation’ and thereby, to spectacular profits from onion cultivation, leading to the worsening of social inequalities among farmers of this crop. Broadly, this article theorizes the onion as a ‘speculative crop’, one that symbolizes the precarity and possibilities of Indian agriculture in an age of intensive cash-cropping and climate change.

The Covid19 pandemic has led to speculation about the place of offices in the future world of work – while working-from-home was initially mandated by employers (and governments), recent research has reported that the practice has gained popularity among employees. However, most such research is based on experiences of workers in the Global North. The article challenges the conflation of the Global North with global and shifts the focus from ‘flexible working’ and ‘work-life balance’ to issues of access to work infrastructures, including space, internet, and care. It draws upon existing scholarship on home-based work and precarious work, especially gig work, to outlines ways to analyse the implications of working-from-home in diverse settings. Illustrated with the story of Prachi, a young e-commerce worker in Delhi, the article offers work-from/at/for-home as a wider framework that accounts for inequalities in labour and life conditions of workers around the world.

We propose an empirically motivated financial market model in which speculators rely on trend-following, contrarian and fundamental trading rules to determine their orders. Speculators’ probabilistic rule-selection behavior – the only type of intrinsic randomness in our model – depends on past and current performance indicators. Our model replicates a number of important stylized facts of financial markets, most noteworthy their approximate random walk price behavior. For a large number of speculators, the model’s intrinsic randomness vanishes and its dynamics is driven by an analytically tractable nonlinear map. An in-depth investigation into this map provides the key to understanding how the model functions.

The literature on deindustrialisation often neglects the role of finance in the decline in manufacturing, despite the increasing shift towards financial speculation relative to real investments. This paper tries to bridge this gap in the literature by examining the role of finance in Nigeria's premature deindustrialisation, particularly banks’ drive for short-term profits and their choice to lend to the oil and gas sector over manufacturing. We show that deindustrialisation in Nigeria can be traced back to the effect of the neoliberal policies of the 1980s and the take-off of financial liberalisation, corresponding to the decline in manufacturing value added. In the same period, employment share in manufacturing declined, however, at a distinctly lower rate than manufacturing value added. Therefore, higher productivity of labour is considered a less prominent factor for premature deindustrialisation in Nigeria, not least due to the low level of technological upgrading. We argue that the disproportionate flow of bank credit to the oil and gas and services sectors relative to manufacturing is further incentivised by the government's failed subsidy to the oil industry, which guarantees rent extraction for private interests. Using the Autoregressive Distributed lag (ARDL) estimation for the period 1981-2018, we find evidence that suggests a significant negative impact of domestic credit by banks on manufacturing value added in Nigeria. The disproportionate flow of domestic bank credit to the oil and gas and services sectors in Nigeria also indicates a significant negative impact on the country's manufacturing. On the other hand, net domestic credit by financial institutions, which includes financial flows by domestic development banks, has a significant positive impact on manufacturing.

This paper examines the cross hedging effectiveness between UK FTSE100 and world stock index futures from developed and emerging markets: the US, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Malaysia. Our daily dataset spans from August 2002 through November 2019. We apply the OLS, VECM and Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT) to calculate the optimal cross hedge ratio and cross hedging effectiveness. Our empirical results show that the US E-Mini DJIA$5 futures contract is the best cross hedging instrument for the UK FTSE100, followed by the Australia S&P/ASX 200. The multiscale cross hedging effectiveness results from the MODWT estimation suggest the optimal hedging period of more than 256 days with the US E-Mini DJIA$5 and Australia S&P/ASX 200 futures.

In this paper, a new collaborative filtering method is proposed based on finding similar users directly and indirectly to overcome sparsity challenge. Moreover, selecting these users through extracting dominant opinion patterns leads to tackling scalability. In this method, frequent opinions between users are extracted to be used as dominant patterns. Then, users corresponding to the same dominant pattern are considered as direct similar users. Direct similar users who have seen more items and have corresponded to more than one pattern are regarded as reference users. Each reference user mediates between users who may have no/few commonly seen items and they are considered as indirect similar users. Utilizing indirect similar user helps the method to predict opinion of query user about items, which have not been seen by any direct similar user before. Clearly, indirect users are selected based on speculation using available information about direct users’ preferences. Thus, the effect of indirect users is considered to be stricter than that of direct users on the final prediction step. Experiments conducted on MovieLens small, MovieLens 100 k, MovieLens 1 M, and Jester datasets showed that the proposed method outperforms the previously introduced methods, especially on sparse data.

High predictability of returns on housing suggests pervasive irrationality on the part of market participants. In this paper, we show that with small transactions costs, returns may remain highly predictable even if the market contains substantial numbers of risk neutral, rational speculators. The reason is that option values associated with the transactions costs substantially delay arbitrage transactions. Our model can generate positive short-run and negative long-run autocorrelation in returns on housing similar to those identified by past empirical studies.

This paper examines the occurrence of financial contagion in the futures markets, amidst global geo-economic events, for the period of 2010–2020. Our dataset consists of 40 pairs of futures contracts and underlying spots covering agricultural, energy, stock index, and metal futures. We apply the Wavelet Correlation Breakdown test to observe any abrupt changes in spot-futures correlation before and after 2010. We then use the spectrogram by Wavelet Power and Energy Spectrum to approximate the duration of spot and futures volatility caused by the financial contagion. The Wavelet Correlation Breakdown tests’ results confirm the existence of financial contagion in the futures markets. Based on Wavelet Power and Energy analysis’s spectrogram, we also find that the contagion in the futures markets during global geo-economic events typically lasts about two months.

This study examines the impact of trading activities on price discovery in the Bitcoin futures markets. We find that trades of hedgers are positively correlated with the modified information shares in both CME and CBOE futures markets, suggesting that their trading promotes futures market efficiency. Retailers’ trading activity relates negatively to the price discovery of the CME Bitcoin futures and thus destabilizes the market. Speculators exert positive (negative) impact on the price discovery in the CME (CBOE) Bitcoin futures. Our finding that CME’s Bitcoin futures exhibit superior price discovery than CBOE’s provides plausible justification for CBOE’s decision in March 2019 to suspend further listings of Bitcoin futures contracts.

The global food system currently requires a transformation in terms of both social and technological norms in order to be environmentally sustainable and productive enough to feed a growing global population. This paper suggests that China has the innovation regime that is the most capable of offering this transformation due the unique dynamic occurring between its top-down policy and bottom-up initiatives. Indeed, it is often the resulting spin-off developments, as a result of these two forces colliding, which creates interesting innovative trajectories that have a transformative potential. This paper identifies land consolidation as the policy most emblematic top-down agricultural process, food safety initiatives as the significant bottom-up equivilent and suggests that the rise of Taobao villages and rural e-commerce are the unintended innovative responses resulting from these forces. The dynamic of this innovation, I argue, can be tentatively mapped out to offer a grounded speculation of where, and how, the most intriguing, and perhaps most likely, developmental trajectories will occur regarding China's agricultural development. As such, this paper argues that Alternative Food Networks are one such evolving example and that the rise of ‘enterprise-based recreational agriculture parks’ - like Beijing's Xiedao Green Resort - points towards how particular innovative trajectories, through unique forms of scalar practices, could develop and shape, agricultural spaces in China.

Investor preferences for holding speculative assets are likely to be more pronounced ahead of firms’ earnings announcements, probably because of lower inventory costs and immediate payoffs or because of enhanced investor attention. We show that the demand for lottery-like stocks is stronger ahead of earnings announcements, leading to a price run-up for these stocks. In sharp contrast to the standard underperformance of lottery-like stocks, lottery-like stocks outperform non-lottery stocks by about 52 basis points in the 5-day window ahead of earnings announcements. However, this return spread is reversed by 80 basis points in the 5-day window after the announcements. Moreover, this inverted-V-shaped pattern on cumulative return spreads is more pronounced among firms with a greater retail order imbalance, among firms with low institutional ownership, and in regions with a stronger gambling propensity, and it is also robust after controlling for past 12-month returns and various proxies for investor attention.

Proponents of circuit breakers justify the practice citing its utility in placating stressed markets, persuading agents to reflect on available information, and to trade rationally. Opponents counter by calling it an infringement on laissez-faire price discovery process citing the lack of conclusive evidence of their effectiveness in market crises. After nearly three decades of theoretical and empirical scrutiny, this discord persists. Most of the empirical focus in this domain revolves around ex-post performance of circuit breakers in cooling off the market, interference in trading, volatility splattering, and delayed assimilation of information. A less explored hypothesis is a potential for traders to hasten trading plans fearing illiquidity or trading blockade. Thus, the existence of the circuit breaker alone can induce its tripping. Known formally as the magnet effect, this hypothesis remains less explored due–inter alia–to paucity of data and methodological limitations. Greater availability of high-frequency datasets in recent times, however, has spurred a growth in empirical works focusing purely on the magnet effect hypothesis. As this nascent sub-discipline in market microstructure grows, this paper undertakes one of the first formal surveys looking to consolidate theoretical and empirical works on magnet effect. Moreover, we discuss methodological challenges and analytic limitations which strain the credibility of academic research findings in this domain; particularly among regulators.

This work presents Speculative Transaction Replication (STR), a protocol that exploits transparent speculation techniques to enhance performance of geo-distributed, partially replicated transactional data stores. In addition, we define a new consistency model, Speculative Snapshot Isolation (SPSI), a variant of Snapshot Isolation (SI), which shelters applications from the subtle anomalies that arise when using speculative transaction processing techniques. STR provides a form of speculation that is fully transparent for programmers (it does not expose the effects of misspeculations to clients). Since the speculation techniques employed by STR satisfy SPSI, they can be leveraged by application programs in a transparent way, without requiring any source-code modification to applications designed to operate using SI. STR combines two key techniques: speculative reads, which allow transactions to observe pre-committed versions, which can reduce the ‘effective duration’ of pre-commit locks and enhance throughput; Precise Clocks, a novel timestamping mechanism that uses per-item timestamps with physical clocks, which together greatly enhance the probability of successful speculation. We assess STR’s performance on up to nine geo-distributed Amazon EC2 data centers, using both synthetic benchmarks as well as realistic benchmarks (TPC-C and RUBiS). Our evaluation shows that STR achieves throughput gains up to 11 × and latency reduction up to 10 × (with respect to non-speculative systems that ensure SI) in workloads characterized by low inter-data center contention. Furthermore, thanks to a self-tuning mechanism that dynamically and transparently enables and disables speculation, STR offers robust performance even when faced with unfavorable workloads that suffer from high misspeculation rates.

Most of the existing studies measure the risk dependence between corporations based on quantitative market data, which is susceptible to interference from market speculative behaviors. This paper innovatively studies the risk dependence between the energy corporations based on their textual risk disclosures in annual financial reports, which can fully reflect their fundamentals and avoid market speculation. The risk dependence between energy corporations is measured by the similarity of the disclosed risk factors faced by them. The empirical analysis discusses the risk dependence of 482 U.S. energy corporations based on the textual risk disclosures of 3,390 10-K filings from 2005 to 2017. The results show that the text-based risk dependence between the energy corporations is informative about their future stock co-movement.

In perfect capital markets, the futures price of an asset should be an unbiased forecast of its realized spot price when the contract matures. In reality, futures prices are often higher for some assets and lower for others. However, there is no stability in the relationship between futures prices and the realized spot prices. This instability has been a puzzle in the existing financial literature. The key to this puzzle may lie in the nature of the model and the lack of market imperfections. In this study, we take a theoretical approach in a dynamic multi-period environment. We incorporate competition between disparate economic agents and impose financial frictions (i.e., imperfections) that are in the form of hedging and borrowing limits on them. Our model gives rise to multiple equilibria, each with unique market clearing prices, with the market switching between these equilibria. Our analysis incorporates a comprehensive consideration of the risks faced by the futures markets participants (i.e., speculators and hedgers) and leads to a better understanding of the puzzle. JEL Classification

The impact of collaborative research approaches on science and society has been subject to much debate and speculation. However, empirically grounded analyses of the process-impact link remain the exception. That includes comparing participation planning, intended processes, expectations and implementation. This paper delivers a theoretically informed comparison between different approaches to participation that are practised. It does so by performing a criteria-guided analysis of 31 participatory sustainability studies covering different areas of study and spatial levels. This provides an understanding of how participation is translated from theory into practice, what challenges occur that contradict initial aims, and how these potentially influence expected effects. The results show stark divergences between planning and implementation: persistent normative ideals in the planning phase, echoing deliberative and emancipatory claims, contrast with an emphasis on effectiveness during implementation. This leads to a systematic over-representation of experts and an under-representation of diverse societal actors in the studies. The focus is on producing directly measurable results rather than promoting possible (long-term) societal effects. These findings facilitate a deeper discussion of which conditions and procedures could aid the design and delivery of high-impact collaboration in the future.

Speculation in the commodity futures market distorts commodity prices, driving them away from rational levels. This phenomenon, which is known as the financialization of commodities, has raised significant concerns in recent years. Particularly, in the agricultural market, ‘financialized’ commodities have been blamed for high world food prices. In this paper, we examine the financialization of agricultural commodities in China. To do so, a time-varying copula is employed to investigate the dependence structure between commodities and stock markets. Four insightful results are obtained. First, positive correlations between agricultural commodities and stock markets demonstrate the financialization of agricultural commodities. Second, the identified correlations are time-varying and idiosyncratic with respect to products. Third, the agricultural commodity market is more closely correlated with the domestic stock market than with the overseas market. Fourth, a growing dependence between commodities and the stock markets is detected and the co-movement became stronger after the global financial crisis.

The role of speculation in the commodities market is still controversial. While several studies use linear models of causality to explain the relationship between speculation and price movements, there is a gap regarding the application of these analyses to detect causality. We compare linear and nonlinear methodologies to analyze whether speculation affects commodities’ price or if speculators are trend-followers, not only in the bullish market but also in the bearish one. The results suggest that there is no pattern in the cause and effect relationship, so even more sophisticated models are not capable of capturing causal effects.

European sovereign debt markets have been under scrutiny since the sovereign debt crisis of 2009. In this paper, we study to what extent the extreme dynamics were driven by fundamentals or speculation. We do so by decomposing bond and CDS spreads into fundamental and non-fundamental parts using a heterogeneous agent model. We find that bond markets are driven for 80% by liquidity trading, 13% by credit news, and only 5.4% by speculation. The CDS market is for 49% driven by credit news, 45% liquidity trading, and 5.5% speculation. The relative importance of the different types of agents varies over time, though.

Using granular data on both debt and credit default swaps (CDS) exposures by French investors on non-financial corporations (NFC) and euro area banks on French NFCs, we study how CDS reallocate investors' exposure to credit risk. To guide our investigation, we propose a methodology to disentangle investors' strategies between speculators, hedgers, and arbitrageurs. We make three contributions. First, CDS reduce exposure concentration. Hedgers offset their most concentrated exposures while speculators use them as a substitute for debt. Second, speculators use CDS to reach for yield both between and within rating classes. This could pertain to relatively lower leverage constraints at lower ratings, or to the opacity advantage of CDS. Finally, CDS increase investment funds and dealers portfolio risk. Both reach for yield and exposure diversification contribute to this rise. Exposure diversification in the CDS market thus does not translate into return diversification.

We study energy futures option returns for crude oil, natural gas, heating oil, and gasoline. Average call and put returns are negative at short maturities, more so for OTM options, and increase with maturity. Put returns are less negative than call returns, but this is not the case for delta-hedged returns, indicating that the aggregate risk of the underlying energy futures is priced in the raw option returns. Moneyness patterns in raw and delta-hedged returns are similar to patterns for index option returns. Significant differences between the four commodities remain after removing the effect of the underlying futures returns, with natural gas as the main outlier. Variance risk premiums are negative and explain some maturity patterns in returns, but they cannot account for return differences across markets. Energy producers are net short the underlying through their option positions, and speculators net long. The larger the net long position of the speculators, the lower the returns on call options, which suggests that demand from speculators may affect option returns in energy markets.

Between August 2 and 27, 2010, the Shanghai Futures Exchange increased commission fees for day traders of zinc and natural rubber futures contracts by changing from a single-trip to a round-trip commission. This experiment provides a unique opportunity to study the effects of changes in commission fees only for speculators on market liquidity, trading volume, and return volatility within an order-driven futures market. The results show that an increase in commission fees for speculators in an order-driven futures market has a positive effect on return volatility but no significant effect on trading volume and bid-ask spreads.

This study investigates the impact of liquidity constraints on the dynamics of the cash-futures basis in the Chinese futures market. By analyzing the trading behaviors of hedgers, speculators, and arbitrageurs in a liquidity constraint context, we document two effects: the expectation effect and the liquidity effect. We further propose a set of threshold vector error correction models (VECMs) for the CSI 300 index and CSI 300 index futures to examine these two effects separately and jointly. We find evidence for both effects. We also find that a basis-liquidity-based threshold VECM, which includes both effects, performs well in explaining why the degree of persistence of a large basis depends on the direction of divergence in the cash-futures price relationship, a stylized fact we observe in the Chinese futures market.

Based on the commodity property and finance property of gold in the international gold futures market, the influence factors of international gold futures price volatility are analyzed from the perspectives of supply and demand factors, financial factors and speculation factors. The structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model is applied to investigating the direction and strength of the effects of influence factors on the international gold futures prices and the variance decomposition approach (VDA) is used to compare the contributions of these factors. The results show that the supply and demand factors still play a fundamental role in the international gold futures price volatility and the role of “China's gold demand” is exaggerated. The financial factors and speculation factors have significant impacts on the international gold futures price volatility, which reflects that the financial property of gold becomes increasingly important. Governments and investors should pay close attention to the financial property of gold futures.

The 2015 Chinese stock market crisis has increased focus on the factors that determine the volatility of stock spot and futures markets. In this paper, we investigate the economic sources of CSI 300 spot and futures volatilities before and after the stock market crash based on the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model with the mixed frequency data sampling scheme (GARCH-MIDAS). It shows that the risks of the CSI 300 Index tend to increase with higher inflation, lower economic growth, tighter credit conditions and more variant credit policies, while the risks of CSI 300 futures tend to increase with higher inflation, tighter credit conditions, more variant inflation rates and more variant credit policies. The effects of economic fundamentals are greater and more prolonged than the effects of economic uncertainty and speculative trading. Investors are advised to pay attention to the changes in price levels, economic development and credit policies when managing their portfolio risks. More importantly, as speculation has contributed little to the risks of CSI 300 futures in the post-crisis period, regulators are advised to ease trading restrictions and resume index futures trading gradually.

We examine the unexplored effects on art markets of artist death (asset supply constraints), collectors' wealth (background risk) and forgery risk (risk of investment fraud), under short-sale constraints and risk aversion. Speculative bubbles emerge and have the form of an option strangle (a put option and a call option), in which strike prices are affected by art supply constraints and the association of the artworks' emotional value with both collectors' wealth and forgery, while the options' underlying asset is the stochastic heterogeneous beliefs of agents. We show that speculative bubbles increase with four elements: art supply constraints; a more negative correlation between collectors' wealth and the artworks' emotional value; a more positive relationship between forgery and the artworks' emotional value; and more heterogeneous beliefs. These four sources of speculation increase the expected turnover rate; however, they also augment the variance of speculative bubbles, which generates price discounts (i.e. risk premiums) for holding artworks. Consequently, the net impact of speculation is not necessarily increased art prices. This study not only contributes to the art market literature, but also to studies about speculative bubbles in other financial markets under heterogeneous beliefs, short-sale constraints and risk-averse investors, since we additionally consider the simultaneous effect of asset supply constraints, investors' background risk and the risk of investment fraud.

In a novel model of an endowment economy, we analyze coexistence and competition between traditional fiat money (Dollar) and another intrinsically worthless medium of exchange, not controlled by a central bank, such as Bitcoin. Agents can trade consumption goods in either currency or hold on to currency for speculative purposes. A central bank ensures a Dollar inflation target, while Bitcoin mining is decentralized via proof-of-work. We analyze Bitcoin price evolution and interaction between the Bitcoin price and monetary policy which targets the Dollar. We obtain a fundamental pricing equation, which in its simplest form implies that Bitcoin prices form a martingale. We derive conditions, under which Bitcoin speculation cannot happen, and the fundamental pricing equation must hold. We show that the block rewards are not a tax on Bitcoin holders: they are financed by Dollar taxes imposed by the Dollar central bank. We discuss monetary policy implications and characterize the range of equilibria.

This paper examines information spillover between WTI returns and investor sentiment indices measured by various trader positions using a connectedness approach. Our findings show that sentiment by trader type is highly correlated with WTI returns. Among the different sentiment types, speculator sentiment makes the largest contribution to WTI returns variation over the full sample period. The dynamic results show that the influence of investor sentiment increases significantly when oil prices are in a downward movement in which hedger sentiment plays the leading role in information transmission.

Lip print identification has been proposed as an additional tool for crime investigation because of the supposed uniqueness of labial grooves; however, critics of the validity and reliability for methods and techniques redefined standards and requirements in order to consider this discipline a real forensic identification science. During our research we identified recent literature, presented here, which although extensive, have focused almost entirely on anthropological topics with outdated references which were not from primary sources and, furthermore, were erroneously quoted. Currently, authors continue to use the concept of lip pattern uniqueness, yet the greatest part of their research has failed to support this hypothesis under current scientific standards. Concepts and designs needed to evaluate materials for lip print development - the isolation of DNA, evaluation of inter-rater reliability in identifying their patterns or known potential rate of error - are scarcely mentioned in the reviewed literature. Lip print identification has been important historically, but the new paradigm makes the redefinition of the current research necessary to stop guesswork and speculation.

Mechanisms for risk sharing are critical in infrastructure project financing. In public-private partnerships (PPP) for highway projects, provision of guarantees by the government to the investors is an important risk-sharing scheme. Because the government does not have the same information that private investors have, information asymmetry leads to speculation. In this paper, investors grab minimum revenue guarantee by deliberately reducing in earnings is identified as a moral hazard. To solve this problem, a game theory model for studying mechanisms that encourage/incentivize investors to adopt a positive attitude toward cooperation with the government is established. In particular, we design incentive mechanisms that engage private investors based on their profitability outlook. The results show that blindly increasing the amount of a reward or a penalty is not an effective way to guide an investor’s behavior. Adopting flexible incentive mechanisms during different stages of a project proves effective in influencing investors’ willingness to cooperate with the government as well as in maximizing the benefits they realize from the project.

In this paper, we investigate the role of open interest, trading volume and trading positions of trader groups on volatility spillover between futures and spot markets of two major commodities; oil and gold during the last two decades. The initial analysis including only spot and futures markets imply that the relationship is bi-directional for crude oil, and uni-directional for gold. Though, including open interest and trading volume enrich our results indicating open interest and spot markets are closely connected and trading volume provide cross-market information, which might suggest investors investing in both commodities make these markets informationally connected. Given the increasing presence of institutional investors in commodity markets during the sample period, we also check whether speculators lead to excess volatility in futures market as financialization proponents argue. Findings depict that actually the spillover is from futures market to speculators’ positions implying volatility in commodity markets is not attributable to speculators in the last two decades.

In view of the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies, the purpose of the present study is to offer new insights on the herding behavior of cryptocurrencies. To this end, we employ market prices of the largest cryptocurrencies for a period extending from August of 2015 through February of 2018. Results derived from the standard testing procedure using ordinary least squares pointed to the existence of herding behavior in the cryptocurrencies’ market. Evidence on herding effects are further corroborated employing a quantile regression that accounts for the asymmetric nature of cryptocurrencies’ returns. However, herding behavior is no longer present when a more robust time-varying regression model is employed. Our results entail significant implications for researchers, investors and market authorities.

The shale gas boom of the early 2000s saw the highest and most volatile natural gas prices and production in history. Advances in horizontal drilling, 3-D seismic imaging, and hydraulic fracturing made it highly profitable for firms to produce large quantities of shale gas. This period was also characterized by a shift in market structure. The U.S. natural gas market was historically defined by large firms, but a large number of small firms began entering the market after 2000. While small firms made a negligible contribution to natural gas production during the shale gas boom, their entry may signal overcapitalization, productivity growth, and increased responsiveness of natural gas markets to exogenous shocks. We develop a real options model of market entry and exit and use data on natural gas drilling activity to test three potential explanations for small firm entry during the boom: 1. technological advances, 2. land lease speculation, and 3. regime change in natural gas prices. Our analysis provides mixed support for the first explanation but strong support for the last two.

In recent years, there has been extensive debate about the increasing speculative activity in commodity markets and passive index-investments, which are blamed for causing extreme long-term variations and price bubbles. This study sheds light on the question of what effect increasing speculative activity has on liquidity characteristics and aims to identify whether speculators are liquidity providers or consumers. This study finds weak evidence that speculative activity provides liquidity in the long term, while short-term speculative trading consumes liquidity. Further, the analysis shows that stock market liquidity and the liquidity of commodities have a strong positive correlation.

Bubbles and speculative behavior have been documented in real-world and experimental asset markets alike. Moinas and Pouget (2013) introduce the bubble game representing a sequential market with both bubble and no-bubble equilibria, in which speculative behavior can be analyzed using concepts from game theory. This article presents a ready-to-use software application for oTree (Chen et al., 2016) which allows to easily conduct the game in various settings within a modern web-programming framework. Researchers can adapt the game to their needs in a straightforward way by modifying thoroughly-documented variables in a single file. The software module supports responsive graphical designs and is prepared for multilingual use on any device with a web browser, allowing the implementation in the field, the laboratory, the classroom, or online.

Does the provision of leverage to retail traders improve market quality or facilitate socially inefficient speculation that enriches financial intermediaries? We evaluate the effects of 2010 regulations that cap leverage in the U.S. retail foreign exchange market. Using three unique data sets and a difference-in-differences approach, we document that the leverage-constraint reduces trading volume by 23%, alleviates high-leverage traders’ losses by 40%, and reduces brokerages’ operating capital by 25%. Yet, the policy does not affect the relative bid-ask prices charged by the brokerages. These results suggest the policy improves belief-neutral social welfare without reducing market liquidity.

This paper examines how money flow interacts with interest rates and commodity prices by using China's unique daily money-flow data and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. It is found that the money flow to the commodity financial market is driven negatively by interest rates. There was a roundabout transmission from international interest rates to market liquidity, then to price movement and then to money flow during the 2008 international financial crisis. Our analysis finds evidence that neither money flow nor market liquidity positively impact commodity prices, which does not support the popular belief that speculation drives up commodity price fluctuations. Holiday effects also positively influence money flow and commodity prices, while weekend effects positively influenced commodity prices only in the aftermath of the 2008 international financial crisis but negatively influenced international interest rates.

This paper describes equilibrium interactions between dynamic portfolio rebalancing given a private end-of-day trading target and dynamic trading on long-lived private information. Order-splitting for portfolio rebalancing injects multifaceted dynamics in the market. These include autocorrelated order flow, sunshine trading, endogenous learning, and short-term speculation. The model has testable implications for intraday patterns in volume, liquidity, price volatility, order-flow autocorrelation, differences between informed-investor and rebalancer trading strategies, and for how these patterns comove with trading-target volatility and other market conditions.

Increasing empirical evidence shows that natural gas prices have decoupled from oil prices. Yet there remains an open question as to what are the determining factors of natural gas prices following the demise of oil-indexation. This paper aims to address this question using a dynamic model averaging (DMA) approach. DMA can help identify key/important price determinants, and importantly, does so within a time varying framework allowing us to document how the set of determinants has evolved in response to key market changes. Using time series data between 2001 and 2018, we demonstrate a clear declining role of oil prices in the natural gas pricing mechanism, verifying the demise of indexation. Market or fundamental factors, such as weather, demand and supply conditions, have at the same time become more important. In addition, our results illustrate an increasing role from financial markets, captured by speculation related variables, providing empirical evidence to support the recent literature on commodity market financialization. The rising impact of speculation to natural gas prices introduces questions over how to balance market efficiency and risk management in the post-indexation regime.

In this paper, I consider an exchange economy with complete markets where agents have heterogeneous beliefs and, possibly, preferences, and investigate the Market Selection Hypothesis that speculation rewards the agent with the most accurate beliefs. First, on the methodological level, I derive the relative consumption dynamics as a function of agents' effective discount factors, related to consumption decisions across time, and agents' effective beliefs, related to consumption decisions across states. Sufficient conditions for agents' survival, either in isolation or in a group, depend on the relative size of effective discount factors and on the relative accuracy of effective beliefs. Then, I show that in economies where agents maximize an Epstein–Zin utility the Market Selection Hypothesis fails: there exist parametrizations where the agent with correct beliefs vanishes and parametrizations where beliefs heterogeneity persists in the long run. Results are robust to local changes of beliefs, risk preferences, and the aggregate endowment process. These failures are shown not to occur when agents' Epstein–Zin utility has a subjective expected utility representation due to an interdependence of effective discount factors and effective beliefs.

As planners and engineers in large cities around the United States continue to seek solutions to transportation-related problems such as congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, and safe and efficient access to goods and services, light rail transit (LRT) systems have become an increasingly popular option. While LRT has the potential to address these issues, it also has the potential to create negative externalities. This study examines the effects that LRT has had on the single-family residence housing market in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, in both the announcement and operations phases. Using spatially explicit quasi-experimental econometric models, we found that the announcement of the LRT led to increases in price per square feet for properties as distance to LRT station decreases while the price per square foot of properties decreases as distance to LRT station decreases after the system began operations. These results indicate that while land speculation may have resulted from the announcement of the LRT system, homeowners living closest to the stations during operations may have viewed the LRT stations more as a nuisance than a benefit.

We examine the trading behavior of Chinese domestic investors after they were given access to the B-share market in 2001. Surprisingly, we find that only 2% of investors began buying B shares. Even among these 2%, investors were less likely to buy B shares if they had more experience in the A-share market, and vice-versa. Thus, prior market experience limits the extent to which investors respond to A/B-share premiums and liquidity and lowers their performance. Our findings cannot be explained by government intervention, investor heterogeneity, foreign currency constraint, A/B-share liquidity or speculation differentials, or information advantage.

The nascent adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the public sector is being assessed in contradictory ways. But while there is increasing speculation about both its dangers and its benefits, there is very little empirical research to substantiate them. This study aims at mapping the challenges in the adoption of AI in the public sector as perceived by key stakeholders. Drawing on the theoretical lens of framing, we analyse a case of adoption of the AI system IBM Watson in public healthcare in China, to map how three groups of stakeholders (government policy-makers, hospital managers/doctors, and Information Technology (IT) firm managers) perceive the challenges of AI adoption in the public sector. Findings show that different stakeholders have diverse, and sometimes contradictory, framings of the challenges. We contribute to research by providing an empirical basis to claims of AI challenges in the public sector, and to practice by providing four sets of guidelines for the governance of AI adoption in the public sector.

Land speculation can increase idle or inefficient land use, thus causing a number of problems, which many countries around the world address with reasonable administrative intervention. According to China’s “Disposal Measures for Idle Land”, the land development time is limited to two years. If this time is exceeded, the government will restore the land use rights to the state without compensation for the developer. 1 Using the perspective of American call options, this study combines the Optimal Stopping Time and the Martingale Theory in Real Option Pricing Theory. Both land and house price data from 2010 to 2016 have been integrated for Beijing, Wuhan, and Nanning in China. Furthermore, an empirical analysis of the optimal stopping time for land development has been conducted in these three cities to study whether the imposed limit on land development time reduces land prices. The results show that the optimal stop-time fluctuation of land development is large due to factors such as house price and land price volatility as well as social rates of return. In addition, the optimal stopping time for land development differs in specific regions and periods of different levels of economic development. Limiting the land development time will sometimes lower the land price and exert a stronger impact on low-price areas. Although limiting the land development time can help certain areas to reduce idle land, the suppression of land speculation and the stabilization of land prices are not obvious. This strategy will, however, obstruct the development of real estate economy. The conclusions of this study will help the government to formulate a sound policy, control land speculation, improve land use efficiency, and reduce the occurrence of land waste.

The present study investigates the relation between different measures of price volatility (conditional, historical and implied) and different types of speculation (short-run, long-run and excessive) in futures commodity markets for the period 2000–2015. To this purpose, we first use a pairwise Granger causality analysis for 28 individual commodities belonging to energy, agricultural and metal markets. Then, we implement a novel combination of combinations of p-values test to assess whether lead-lag relations exist between speculation and price volatility for broad categories of commodities. The results of both testing procedures show that the majority of significant relations refer to agricultural commodities and that tendentially short-run speculation leads volatility. This means that noise trading has a leading power on market volatility and scalpers are a class of volatility-drivers.

The business corporation is the central economic institution in a modern economy. A company’s senior executives, with the advice and support of the board of directors, are responsible for the allocation of corporate resources to investments in productive capabilities. Senior executives also advise the board on the extent to which, given the need to invest in productive capabilities, the company can afford to make cash distributions to shareholders. Motivating corporate resource-allocation decisions are the modes of remuneration that incentivize and reward the top executives of these companies. A sound analysis of the operation and performance of a modern economy requires an understanding of not only how much these executives are paid but also the ways in which the prevailing system of executive pay influences their decisions to allocate corporate resources. In the United States since the last half of the 1980s the overriding goal of U.S. corporations has been to “maximize shareholder value,” with corporate performance measured by a company’s “total shareholder return”: percentage stock-price appreciation plus dividend yield. Also since the 1980s, the most important components of the total compensation of senior executives have been modes of stock-based pay in the forms of stock options and stock awards. This stock-based pay is structured to incentivize executives to make corporate allocation decisions that will boost the stock prices of the companies that employ them and reward them for achieving that objective. There are three drivers of stock prices: innovation, speculation, and manipulation. The first critical question that this paper addresses is which of these drivers, individually or in combination, contribute to a company’s stock-price performance. Then we can ask the second critical question: Does executive compensation reflect the success of the company in value creation, or the power of senior executives to engage in value extraction? The “value extracting CEO” hypothesis posits that, in the United States, a significant portion of senior executive compensation rewards them for making decisions that foment speculation and manipulate stock prices, and thereby extract value for their own personal gain. In section four of the paper, I invoke the theory of innovative enterprise to support this hypothesis and debunk the dominant ideology that companies should be run to “maximize shareholder value.” Finally, I elaborate the policy implications for controlling the power of the value extracting CEO, including a) banning stock buybacks, b) requiring executive compensation that rewards innovation rather than speculation and manipulation, and c) placing stakeholders representing households as taxpayers, workers, and consumers on boards of directors of publicly listed companies, along with shareholders who represent households as savers. An intellectual precondition for these reforms is the rejection of the ideology that companies should be run to maximize shareholder value, which means replacing agency theory with innovation theory as a mode of analyzing how the operation of an economy, supported by the strategies and structures of the business enterprises within it, can attain the objectives of stable and equitable economic growth.