Understanding dynamic conditional correlations between oil, natural gas and non-energy commodity futures markets

We look at the dynamic conditional correlations (DCCs) between oil, natural gas and other non-energy commodity futures markets, obtained from a DCC-GARCH model over the period 1998-2014. They arc positive and display a sharp increase around year 2008 and a subsequent decrease. The DCCs between energy and metals are larger than the energy-agriculture ones. To understand how macroeconomic and financial factors, as well as speculative activity, influence them, we estimate an ARDL(1,1) model, adopting a pooled mean group (PMG) estimator. We observe that macroeconomic and financial variables are significantly correlated with the energy-agriculture and energy-metals DCCs. Speculative activity contributes to explain the energy-agriculture DCCs but not those of the energy-metals