An investigation of the price discovery role of futures markets: A dynamic time warping analysis of the United States corn markets

Abstract

Futures markets are critical to price discovery and often dominate spot markets. We analyze the linkages between daily corn futures and spot prices in the United States using dynamic time warping. This nonparametric pattern recognition technique has several advantages over traditional time series methods. First, it can detect multiple changes in the lead‐lag associations between the two prices within short intervals; the duration with which one series leads or lags another is not assumed to be fixed. Second, the method can be applied to time series without regard to their stationarity properties. This greatly expands the scope of this method to accommodate a wide range of time series. Third, it lends itself well to studying small samples, which econometricians encounter routinely. Fourth, the results are presented intelligibly using intuitive visualizations. Our results show that futures markets are critical to price discovery; nevertheless, spot markets dominate futures markets intermittently. We discuss the results in detail, setting them in the proper context. [EconLit Citations: C14, C32, Q02, Q11].