Measuring Market Efficiency and Volatility in Agriculture Commodities

In any agriculture-dominated economy, like India, farmers face not only yield risk but price risk as well. Commodity futures and derivatives have a crucial role to play in the price risk management process, especially in agriculture. The purpose of this book is to study the market efficiency, unbiasedness and the direction of causality among four agricultural commodity futures contracts for a forecasting horizon.The research effort should be transdisciplinary involving financial economists, agricultural economists and a deep market insight to understand the impact of microstructure variables like volume,volatility, open interest, transaction process, etc.Excessive speculation and manipulations in futures markets is driving the physical market prices away from fundamentals entailing heavy losses on the real stakeholder and sometimes culminating into a fiasco like the one that occurred in 2012 leading to the suspension of guar seed futures contract. It is very important that the regulatory reins are tightened and stringent measures are taken to check market abusive practices like price rigging,hoarding and cartelization.