Iron ore spot price volatility and change in forward pricing mechanism

To examine the impact of the change in forward pricing mechanism on the volatility of iron ore spot prices, we model the iron ore daily price of Platts IODEX from October 7, 2008 to September 21, 2012. The identified iron ore spot price tends to be less volatile after the introduction of quarterly pricing mechanism. Our main approaches are as follows: (i) to decompose the spot price of Platts IODEX into two subsamples and relate the result of the structural break to the date of the switch in the iron ore forward pricing mechanism; (ii) to apply the EGARCH (1, 1) model to simultaneously capture the long memory and the asymmetric effect on the volatility of the iron ore spot price; and (iii) to delineate the news impact curve to further interpret the asymmetric effect.