Article
Global Business Review
19(3) 771–789
© 2018 IMI
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0972150917713882
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/gbr
1
The North Cap University (formerly ITM University), Gurgaon, Haryana India.
Corresponding author:
Shashi Gupta, House no. 107, Sector 17, HUDA, Jagadhari-135003, Haryana, India.
E-mail: shashigupta085@gmail.com
An Empirical Analysis of Market
Efficiency and Price Discovery
in Indian Commodity Market
Shashi Gupta
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Himanshu Choudhary
1
D. R. Agarwal
1
Abstract
The present article is an attempt to empirically investigate the long-term market efficiency and price
discovery in Indian commodity futures market. The study has been conducted with eight commodities
which include two agricultural commodities, two industrial commodities, two precious metal and two
energy commodities. Sophisticated statistical methods like restricted cointegration and vector error
correction model (VECM) are used to analyse the spot and futures prices time series. Restricted
cointegration test shows that near-month futures prices for all the commodities are cointegrated with
the spot prices but futures prices of all the commodities are inefficient to predict the future spot price.
Indian commodity futures market evidenced as the thinly traded market (Kumar & Pandey, 2013, Journal
of Indian Business Research, 5(2), 101–121) rejects the null hypothesis of efficiency and unbiasedness for
all the eight commodities which reconfirms the result of Fortenbery and Zapata (1997, Journal of Futures
Markets, 17(3), 279–301). The presence of short-term biases in the Indian futures market is evidenced
in the results of VECM model which indicates the presence of informational efficiency. The statistically
significant value of past prices of spot and futures confirm the short-term inefficiency and biasedness.
The significant value of error correction term (ECT) of futures prices suggests that commodity futures
are the most important indicator of commodity price movements. The important implication of the
results is for market traders. They can use the futures prices to discover the new equilibrium and earn
profits by transmitting it to the spot market. The better understanding of the interconnectedness of
these market would be useful for policymakers who try to establish stability in the financial markets.
Keywords
Indian commodity futures market, long-term market efficiency, restricted cointegration, VECM