World coal markets: Still weakly integrated and moving east

In December 2016, the prominent New York Mercantile Exchange CAPP coal future contract was delisted by the CME, owner of the NYMEX. At that time, all four giant US coal miners were under the protection of Chapter 11. These events illustrate the collapse of coal consumption in the US and the loss of relevance of the Appalachian coal index whose futures were used as a hedging instrument across the world. Our goal in this paper is to revisit the problem of integration of coal markets and to exhibit through multiple perspectives, including a lead/lag analysis of pairs of major indexes, that the world coal market is moving East.