Publications & Papers

Research

Financial econometrics, commodity markets, monetary policy announcements, high-frequency finance, volatility modelling, textual analysis, and financialization.

Publication

The Energy Journal · 2025

Speculative Trading in Energy Markets: Evidence from Macroeconomic Surprises

Boucher, S.-P., Gagnon, M.-H., & Power, G. J. (2025)

PhD Thesis

Three Essays on High-Frequency Return and Volatility Dynamics in Commodities and Financial Futures Markets — doctoral thesis by articles, Université Laval (188 pages). Co-authors: Marie-Hélène Gagnon & Gabriel J. Power.

Chapter 1 · Revised version for The Energy Journal

Speculative Trading in Energy Markets: Evidence from Macroeconomic Surprises

Chapter 2 · Submission version, Journal of Futures Markets

Seeing Through the ETF: Indicative NAV and Commodity Volatility Transmission

Chapter 3 · Manuscript, 2026

Returns and Volatility Around FOMC Announcements: A High-Frequency Analysis of Policy Tone and Novelty

UQO Working Paper Series

Applied econometrics research produced at the Département des sciences administratives, UQO — hedonic pricing, housing markets, and derivatives. Each paper is backed by a fully reproducible pipeline.

UQO Working Paper No. 2 · 53 pages

Decoding Real Estate Descriptions: Semantic Embeddings and Hedonic Pricing of Residential Properties in Quebec

Adds sentence-transformer embeddings of listing descriptions to hedonic models of 17,087 Quebec houses — lifting adjusted R² from 0.452 to 0.511 beyond structural attributes alone.

UQO Working Paper No. 3 · 60 pages

Hedonic Housing Price Models for the United States: A Multi-Method Comparison of Parametric, Quantile, and Machine Learning Approaches

OLS, quantile regression, and gradient-boosting (XGBoost + SHAP) approaches compared on 788,842 Zillow listings covering all 50 states and DC.

UQO Working Paper No. 5 · 51 pages

Airbnb, Residential Rents, and Housing Market Pressure: A Hedonic and Spatial Econometric Analysis

Hedonic, spatial, quantile, and machine-learning evidence from 8,303 Quebec rental listings and 3,456 Airbnb listings — each active Airbnb within 500 m is associated with roughly 0.4% higher asking rent.

UQO Working Paper No. 7 · 29 pages

The Options-Implied Information Content for Cross-Asset Return and Volatility Prediction: Evidence from 3.8 Billion Option Contracts

Options-implied moments forecast returns and volatility on a panel of 264,383 ticker-days (69 tickers, 2010–2025); a kurtosis long/short strategy delivers a Sharpe ratio of 2.33.

UQO Working Paper No. 9 · 26 pages

A Grand Hedonic Model of the Canadian Housing Market: Decomposing the Value of Structure and Location

140,931 MLS listings with 1,153 neighbourhood (FSA) fixed effects — location alone adds ~30 points of R² (46% → 77%), valuing held-out homes with a 15.8% median absolute error (OOS R² = 0.764).

Earlier Working Papers

SSRN Working Paper · May 2022

Has Financialization Changed the Impact of Macro Announcements on U.S. Commodity Markets?

Working Paper · January 2023

Modelling Volatility Dynamics Between Commodity ETFs and Their Net Asset Value using BVAR and HAR Models

Working Paper · November 2023

Returns and Volatility Around FOMC Announcements: A High-Frequency Analysis of Policy Tone and Novelty

Conference Presentations

CRREP Research Day

2022, 2023

Canadian Economics Association — 61st & 62nd Annual Conferences

2022, 2023

7th Winter Workshop on Commodity Markets

Mont-Tremblant, 2024