Angel Pardo

CO2 Prices, Energy and Weather

One of the main objectives of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme is the establishment of a market price level for allowances that show to European CO2 emitting installations the environmental impact of their polluting activities. The aim of this paper is to focus on the daily price changes during 2005 in an attempt to examine the underlying rationality of pricing behaviour. Specifically, we study the effect of those weather and non-weather variables that academic and market agents consider as the major determinants of the of CO2 price levels. The results show that the energy sources are the principal factors in the determination of CO2 price levels, and that only extreme temperatures influence them.

Temperature and seasonality influences on Spanish electricity load

Abstract Deregulation of the Spanish electricity market in 1998 and the possible listing of electricity or weather derivative contracts have encouraged the study of the relationship between electricity demand and weather in Spain. In this paper, a transfer function intervention model is developed for forecasting daily electricity load from cooling and heating degree–days. The influence of weather and seasonality is proved, and is significant even when the autoregressive effects and the dynamic specification of the temperature are taken into account. The estimated general model shows a high predictive power. The results and information presented in this paper could be of interest for current users and potential traders in the deregulated Spanish electricity market.

Spanish Stock Returns: Where is the Weather Effect?

Psychological studies support the existence of an influence of weather on mood. Saunders (1993) and Hirshleifer and Shumway (2001) argue that the weather could affect the behaviour of market traders and, therefore, it should be reflected in the stock returns. This paper investigates the possible relation between weather and market index returns in the context of the Spanish market. In 1989, this market changed its open outcry trading system into a computerised and decentralised trading system. Therefore, it is possible to check the influence of weather variables (sunshine hours and humidity levels) on index returns in an open outcry trading system, and to compare it with a screen traded environment. The empirical evidence indicates that, independently of the trading system, there is no influence of weather on stock prices. Thus, these findings do not contest the notion of efficient markets.

On measuring speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data

This article provides a critical assessment of the line of research that measures speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data. It makes several contributions. First, a detailed theoretical analysis of the measures proposed in the previous literature as proxies for speculative activity clarifies the circumstances in which they fail, as well as the assumptions that have to be made, when they are used as intended. Second, we propose a new way of combining the volume and the open interest figures, which provides additional information regarding the type of trading activity that takes place in the market on a given date. Finally, we analyse empirically the basic statistical properties of all the ratios when they are applied to real data for some of the stock index futures contracts most actively traded in the world. This empirical analysis shows the diverse behaviour of the ratios when they are applied to a common sample of real data, which confirms our previous theoretical findings. Our contributions should be taken into account when any of the measures is used as a proxy for the relative importance of speculative demand in empirical analyses.

CO 2 prices and portfolio management

Since January 2005, the attention on European carbon markets has been increasing and thus the interest in studying the implications of the existence of two new assets in portfolio management. In this article we analyse both the characteristics of the EUAs Phase I and Phase II as a sole investment and the impact of including these two assets, considered separately, in a well-diversified portfolio. In order to control the problems of using historical returns, we have performed this analysis using as expected returns either historical returns or risk-adjusted returns. We find that, although the weights of EUAs are not too important when incorporating the EUAs in an optimal and well-diversified portfolio, the efficient frontier shows an increase in investor possibilities.

Integration and arbitrage in the Spanish financial markets: An empirical approach*

Several authors have introduced different ways to measure the integration between fmancial markets. Most of them are derived from the basic assumptions to price assets, like the Law of One Price or the absence of arbitrage opportunities. Two perfectly integrated markets must give identical price to identical fmal payoffs, and a vector of positive discount factors, common to both markets, must exist. Therefore, if these properties do not hold, their degree of violation can be measured and considered as an integration measure. The present paper empirically test the integration measures in the Spanish fmancial markets. Hence, several interesting values are obtained, like for instance, the state prices or the risk-neutral probabilities. Furthermore, when the risk-neutral probabilities do not exist, explicit cross-market arbitrage portfolios are detected. The results of our test are surprising for several reasons. First of all, the arbitrage opportunities very often appear, and the bid-ask spread and the transaction costs are not able to avoid the arbitrage profits. Furthermore, the criticisms, which are usually argued when empirical papers show the existence of arbitrage opportunities, do not apply here, since we work with perfectly synchronized high frequency data. On the other hand, different integration measures show a similar evolution along the tested period, although these measures give different information about the markets efficiency and integration, and they do not have to be necessarily related.

Carbon Credits: Who is the Leader of the Pack?

We provide the first intraday analysis on the contribution to price discovery of two emissions carbon credits: European Union Allowances (EUAs) and Certified Emission Reductions (CERs). We find that EUAs lead price discovery but CERs play a growing role and, therefore, should not be ignored.

Rolling over EUAs and CERs

Whatever derivative contract has a finite life limited by their maturity. The construction of long series, however, is of interest for academic, hedging and investments purposes. In this study, we analyze the relevance of the choice of the rollover date on European Union Allowances (EUAs) and Certified Emissions Reduction (CERs) futures contracts. We have used five different methodologies to construct long series and the results show that, regardless of the criterion applied, there are not significant differences between the resultant return distribution series. Therefore, the least complex method, which is to roll on the last trading day, can be used in order to reach the same conclusions. Additional liquidity analysis confirms this method as the optimum method to link EUAs and CERs series, indicating that simplicity when linking EUAs and CERs series is not at odds with liquidity.

Speculative and hedging activities in the European Carbon Market

We explore the dynamics of the speculative and hedging activities in futures carbon markets by using volume and open interest data. A comparison of the three phases in the European Carbon Market reveals that (i) Phase II of the EU ETS seems to be the most speculative phase to date and (ii) the highest degree of speculative activity for every single phase occurs at the moment of listing the contracts for the first time. A seasonality analysis identifies a higher level of speculation in the first quarter of each year, related to the schedule of deadlines of the EU ETS. Further analysis confirms that most of the speculative activity each year occurs in the front contract, whereas the hedging demand concentrates in the second-to-deliver futures contract.

Is the EUA a new asset class

The listing of a new asset requires the knowledge of its statistical properties prior to its use for hedging, speculative or risk management purposes. In this paper, we study the stylized facts of European Union Allowances (EUAs) returns. The majority of the phenomena observed, such as heavy tails, volatility clustering, asymmetric volatility and the presence of a high number of outliers are similar to those observed in commodity futures. However, other statistical properties typical of financial assets, such as negative asymmetry and absence of an inflation hedge, are also detected. Therefore, our results indicate, surprisingly, that EUAs do not behave like common commodity futures.