Investigating the Impact of Trade Disruptions on Price Transmission in Commodity Markets: An Application of Threshold Cointegration

Abstract

Threshold cointegration is introduced as an econometric technique to model the impact of trade disruptions on spatial price transmission in commodity markets so that market participants and policy makers can understand the global impact of trade disruptions on prices. The threshold cointegration technique that is employed is flexible in that it allows the number of thresholds and their location to be determined endogenously and the threshold variable to be exogenous to the system. We innovate on the threshold cointegration technique by selecting a measure of trade disruptions as the threshold variable. This innovation can be used for any commodity market that is spatially connected due to arbitrage; however, to illustrate its usefulness we apply the technique to trade disruptions for canola traded between Canada and China using weekly data between 2014 and 2019 and find that canola trade disruptions between Canada and China impacted global price transmission and resulted in market fragmentation.