Concentration and Liquidity Costs in Emerging Commodity Exchanges
(with Andres Trujillo-Barrera and Joost Pennings)
We analyze the relationships among liquidity costs, volume, and volatility in the Brazilian agricultural futures market, along with the role of market concentration. We estimate a structural three-equation IV–GMM model using data from Bolsa, Brasil, Balcão corn and live cattle contracts from March 2014 to February 2016. Results show a negative association between liquidity costs and volume and a positive association between liquidity costs and volatility. Market concentration impacts corn and live cattle differently. Concentration contributes to volume reduction for live cattle and to liquidity costs reduction for corn. Our findings shed light on the microstructure of emerging markets.
Journal of Agricultural and Resouce Economics, 43 (3): 441-456, 2018
"An analysis of the dynamic relationship between the price and quantity of mineral fertilizers and the purchasing power of Brazilian farmers"
(with Cristiane Ogino, Nataliya Popova, and João Martines)
Mineral fertilizers have been some of the major contributors to the increase in agricultural productivity in Brazil since the 1980s. The dependence on scarce natural resources and the extensive use of energy for their synthesis, however, have made agricultural production sensitive to fluctuations in the supply and demand for this type of fertilizers. In this sense, this paper analyzes the dynamics between fertilizers consumed quantity, price and producers’ purchasing power weighted by productivity in Brazil’s Central-East region. This region is responsible for the highest consumption of mineral fertilizers and the largest agricultural production in the country. Using the Structural Vector Autoregressive model (SVAR), three equations for each of the major groups of mineral fertilizers were estimated: nitrogen, phosphate and potassium. The results show that quantity is the most endogenous variable, while the most exogenous variable is price. The estimates of the impulse-response functions show that a shock in fertilizer price contributes to a bigger reduction in quantity consumed than the purchasing power of the producers, with the greatest for the group of potassium fertilizers.
Brazilian Journal of Rural Economics and Sociology, 59 (1): 1-19, 2021