Archives

RR-FiME-15-03 Ivar Ekeland and Maurice Queyranne  In open pit mining, one must dig a pit, that is, excavate the upper layers of ground before reaching the ore. The walls of the pit must satisfy some mechanical constraints, in order not to collapse. The question then arises how to mine the ore optimally, that is, how to …nd the optimal pit. We set up the problem in a continuous (as opposed to discrete) framework, and we show, under weak assumptions, the existence of an optimum pit. For this, we Read more [...]

RR-FiME-15-01 Corinne CHATON In this article, we focus on fuel poverty. More specifically, we analyse this phenomenon‟s dynamic by answering the following question: does France have a fuel poverty trap? First, we define three states/situations into which individuals may be placed: the non-fuel poverty state, the fuel poverty state and the severe fuel poverty state. Second, we use a mover-stayer model that divides the population into two types of individuals: those who remain in the same state Read more [...]

RR-FiME-14-06 René Aïd, Luciano Campi, Delphine Lautier Because of storability constraints, standard no-arbitrage arguments cannot be safely applied in markets of commodities such as energy. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to justify the convergence of forward towards spot prices as time-to-maturity goes to zero. We show that the classical no-arbitrage relationship between spot and forward prices holds through the well-posedness of an expected profit maximization problem for Read more [...]

RR-FiME-14-05 Delphine Lautier, Franck Raynaud and Michel A. Robe We apply the concepts of conditional entropy, information transfers and directed graphs to investigate empirically the propagation of price fluctuations across a futures term structure. We focus on price relationships for North American crude oil futures because this key market experienced several structural changes between 2000 and 2014: financialization (starting in 2003), infrastructure limitations (in 2008-2011) and regulatory Read more [...]

RR-FiME-14-04 Delphine LAUTIER, Julien LING and Franck RAYNAUD We examine the impact of two financial crises on commodity derivative markets: the subprime crisis and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. These crises are "external" to the commodity markets because they occurred in the financial sphere. Still, because commodity markets are now highly integrated with each other and with other financial markets, such events could have had an impact. In order to fully comprehend this possible impact, Read more [...]

RR-FiME-14-03 Corinne CHATON, Elie LACROIX The numbers of households in fuel poverty is increasing. Indeed, more and more people are struggling to heat their homes and therefore more and more people are exposed to low temperatures which can affect their health. In this paper, we use the French database of the Healthcare and Insurance survey to study the link between a subjective measure of fuel poverty (coldness) and self-reported health. We also analyze the impact of other individual and environmental Read more [...]

RR-FiME-14-02 René Aid, Salvatore Federico, Huyên Pham, Bertrand Villeneuve We establish explicit socially optimal rules for an irreversible investment decision with time-to-build and uncertainty. Assuming a price sensitive demand function with a random intercept, we provide comparative statics and economic interpretations for three models of demand (arithmetic Brownian, geometric Brownian, and the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross). Committed capacity, that is, the installed capacity plus the investment in Read more [...]

RR-FiME-14-01 Adrien Nguyen Huu, Nadia Oudjane  

RR-FiME-13-04  Plamen Turkedjiev  Two discretizations of a novel class of Markovian backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) are studied. The first is the classical Euler scheme which approximates a projection of the processes Z, and the second a novel scheme based on Malliavin weights which approximates the mariginals of the process Z directly. Extending the representation theorem of Ma and Zhang [MZ02] leads to advanced a priori estimates and stability results for this class of BSDEs. Read more [...]

RR-FiME-13-05 Ivar Ekeland, Delphine Lautier, Bertrand Villeneuve We propose a simple equilibrium model, where the physical and the derivative markets of the commodity interact. There are three types of agents: industrial processors, inventory holders and speculators. Only the two first of them operate in the physical market. All of them, however, may initiate a position in the paper market, for hedging and/or speculation purposes. We give the necessary and sufficient conditions on the fundamentals Read more [...]