New evidence on crude oil market efficiency

Abstract

This paper examines the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) in crude oil amid the “financialization of commodity markets” and the “fracking revolution”. It applies the generalized spectral derivative test (Hong and Lee 2005) on both West Texas Intermediate and Brent spot and futures markets, alongside a stochastic dominance test (Linton et al., 2005) to investigate arbitrage opportunities across markets and benchmarks. The findings indicate that financialization has made each market more efficient but also created more arbitrage opportunities in spot-futures markets at both benchmarks. The fracking revolution has fragmented oil markets but had little impact on EMH in individual markets or across markets.