Dans les années 60 et avant, le marché international de l'aluminium était présenté comme un cas d'école en matière d'organisation oligopolistique des firmes. En effet, un petit nombre de grands groupes fortement intégrés (les 6 Majeurs) contrôlaient la quasi-totalité du secteur de l'aluminium, des opérations d'extraction de la bauxite, à la fabrication de produits finis à base d'aluminium, en passant par la production d'alumine et d'aluminium en lingots. A partir des années 70, ce monopole est de plus en plus contesté, notamment par des entreprises sur-liquides venues principalement des secteurs miniers et par des entreprises étatiques porteuses de motivations différentes. La création en décembre 1978 du contrat Aluminium au London Metal Exchange (LME) sonne le glas du monopole constitué par les 6 Majeurs. On passe alors d'un système de prix- producteurs, à un véritable système de prix de marché L'objectif de cette thèse est de vérifier, si le LME, bourse pionnière et marché de référence pour les métaux non-ferreux, remplit efficacement ses fonctions financières concernant l'aluminium : Information sur les prix et l'état du marché, protection contractuelle contre les risques de fluctuations des prix, stabilisation des cours.

Dans les années 60 et avant, le marché international de l’aluminium était présenté comme un cas d’école en matière d’organisation oligopolistique des firmes. En effet, un petit nombre de grands groupes fortement intégrés (les 6 Majeurs) contrôlaient la quasi-totalité du secteur de l’aluminium, des opérations d’extraction de la bauxite, à la fabrication de produits finis à base d’aluminium, en passant par la production d’alumine et d’aluminium en lingots. A partir des années 70, ce monopole est de plus en plus contesté, notamment par des entreprises sur-liquides venues principalement des secteurs miniers et par des entreprises étatiques porteuses de motivations différentes. La création en décembre 1978 du contrat Aluminium au London Metal Exchange (LME) sonne le glas du monopole constitué par les 6 Majeurs. On passe alors d’un système de prix- producteurs, à un véritable système de prix de marché L’objectif de cette thèse est de vérifier, si le LME, bourse pionnière et marché de référence pour les métaux non-ferreux, remplit efficacement ses fonctions financières concernant l’aluminium : Information sur les prix et l’état du marché, protection contractuelle contre les risques de fluctuations des prix, stabilisation des cours. / In the 1960s and before, the international aluminium market has been hold up as a paradigm for oligopolistic company organisation. A small number of strongly integrated conglomerates (the six Majors) did indeed control virtually the entire aluminium sector, from bauxite extraction to alumin and aluminum bar production as well as the manufacturing of finished aluminium products. From the 1970s onwards, this monopoly has been more and more called into question, in particular by cash-fuelled mining corporations and state-owned companies driven by different motivations. When the London Metal Exchange (LME) introduced the Aluminium contract in December 1978, the days of the 6 Majors’ monopoly were counted. From there on, prices have been fixed by producers and the market. This thesis aims at determining whether the LME, a pioneering exchange and the prime market for non-iron metals, efficiently fulfils its financial functions concerning aluminium: information about prices and the market situation, legal protection against price fluctuation risks, price stabilization.

This diploma thesis deals with the fundamental analysis of selected metals as commodities, for use in the production of batteries for electric vehicles, to hedge against changes in the price of physical raw materials. Selected metals are analyzed based on the fundamental parameters, historical price development and the current situation on the commodity market. Based on these fundamental data, a recommendation is formulated for the method of hedging the prices of selected commodities.

Tellurium is one of the rarest metals in the earth’s crust. Increased demand for cadmium telluride photovoltaic cells along with an opaque pricing and quantity-reporting system, have recently caused high price volatility and a speculative bubble in the tellurium market, resulting in overstocking and depressed prices. In a longer perspective this may be a threat to cadmium telluride photovoltaics as a power-generating technology. This master thesis compares how actors may perceive news innovation in the opaque tellurium market compared to the more transparent molybdenum market. A quantitative analysis of industry news reporting on the two metals, combined with a SVAR impulse response analysis, helps me determine which actors and factors exert most influence on spot market prices. In the opaque tellurium market, relatively unreliable proxies of supply and demand are most frequent in the news reporting while having a big impact on prices, whereas the transparent molybdenum market uses more reliable variables – such as futures prices – and transparent supply information, whilst also relying on a frequent stream of dependable proxies to scope market sentiments. My findings lead me to recommend policy makers to implement measures to increase market transparency, which may be accomplished by extending the data-sharing regime of the REACH database to minor metal markets. Attempting to limit speculation in minor metal markets is perhaps too blunt a tool to fix an inherent problem of a free exchange-pricing mechanism. / Tellur är en av de mest sällsynta metallerna på Jorden. Ökad efterfrågan av kadmiumtelluridsolpaneler har nyligen orsakat stor volatilitet på tellurmarknaden. Ett opakt prissättnings-och kvantitetsrapporteringssystem har bidragit till att en prisbubbla bildats och spruckit, vilket resulterat i att marknadsaktörer köpt på sig stora lager till höga priser som de sedan inte kunnat sälja vidare. I ett längre perspektiv kan detta innebära begränsningar vid tillverkning av solcellsteknologi baserad på kadmiumtellurid, då ett volatilt pris kan göra nya tellurgruvprojekt alltför riskabla. Denna masteruppsats jämför hur en typisk marknadsaktör kan reagera på prisinnovationer i den opaka tellurmarkanden och den mer transparenta molybdenmarknaden. Metoden består av en kvantitativ analys av facknyheter rörande de två metallerna, varifrån variabler väljs till en SVAR modell med impuls-responsanalys. Urvalet av variabler är få och volatila på den opaka tellurmarknaden, medan den mer transparenta molybdenmarknaden har ett större utbud av variabler som kännetecknas av god transparens och relativ förutsägbarhet. Mina slutsatser leder mig till att rekommendera beslutsfattare att vidta åtgärder för att öka tellurmarknadens transparens genom EU-samarbetet, förslagsvis genom att göra anonymiserad data från REACH databasen tillgänglig för allmänheten. Samtidigt avråder jag från åtgärder som syftar till att minska spekulation, då implementering av en sådan policy kan bli både dyr och komplicerad.

This dissertation contains three essays in international macroeconomics and financial time series forecasting. In the first essay, I show, numerically, that a two-country New-Keynesian Sticky Prices model, driven by monetary and productivity shocks, is capable of explaining the highly positive correlation across the industrialized countries' inflation even though their cross-country correlation in money growth rate is negligible. The structure of this model generates cross-country correlations of inflation, output and consumption that appear to closely correspond to the data. Additionally, this model can explain the internal correlation between inflation and output observed in the data. The second essay presents two important results. First, gains from monetary policy cooperation are different from zero when the elasticity of substitution between domestic and imported goods consumption is different from one. Second, when monetary policy is endogenous in a two-country model, the only Nash equilibria supported by this model are those that are symmetrical. That is, all exporting firms in both countries choose to price in their own currency, or all exporting firms in both countries choose to price in the importer's currency. The last essay provides both conditional and unconditional predictive ability evaluations of the aluminum futures contracts prices, by using five different econometric models, in forecasting the aluminum spot price monthly return 3, 15, and 27-months ahead for the sample period 1989.01-2010.10. From these evaluations, the best model in forecasting the aluminum spot price monthly return 3 and 15 months ahead is followed by a (VAR) model whose variables are aluminum futures contracts price, aluminum spot price and risk free interest rate, whereas for the aluminum spot price monthly return 27 months ahead is a single equation model in which the aluminum spot price today is explained by the aluminum futures price 27 months earlier. Finally, it shows that iterated multiperiod-ahead time series forecasts have a better conditional out-of-sample forecasting performance of the aluminum spot price monthly return when an estimated (VAR) model is used as a forecasting tool.