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Abstract
Exchange rates have long been thought to have an important impact on the export and import
of goods and services, and, thus, exchange rates are expected to influence the price of those
products that are traded. At the same time, energy impacts commodity production in some
very important ways. The use of chemical and petroleum derived inputs has increased in
agriculture over time; the prices of these critical inputs, then, would be expected to alter
supply, and, therefore, the prices of commodities using these inputs. Also, agricultural
commodities have been increasingly used to produce energy, thereby leading to an expectation
of a linkage between energy and commodity markets. In this paper, we examine
the price relationship through time of the primary agricultural commodities, exchange rates,
and oil prices. Using overlapping time periods, we examine the cointegration relationship
between prices to determine changes in the strength of the linkage between markets through
time. In general, we find that commodity prices are linked to oil for corn, cotton, and
soybeans, but not for wheat, and that exchange rates do play a role in the linkage of prices
over time.