FUTURES PRICES LINKAGES IN THE US SOYBEAN COMPLEX

Abstract

This work investigates the linkages among the futures prices of soybeans, soybean meal, and soybean oil in the US. This has been pursued using a flexible methodology that allows modelling price relationships at different parts of their joint distribution. According to the empirical results, the markets are strongly connected in the vertical direction regardless of the sign and the size of shocks. The meal and oil prices maintain a negative relationship at the median and the upper quantiles but they are not connected under large negative shocks. The soybean market is a net transmitter of price risk to the other two markets while price shocks around the median tend to be transmitted with higher intensity relative to those at the extremes.