Nathan Weber / New York Times News ServiceA classroom is designed to look like a trading floor, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The work of Scott Irwin, an Illinois professor, has been widely quoted by opponents of commodities trading reforms, but Wall Street’s influence over academia — Irwin consults for investment banks, and the lab was built with money from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange — often goes unmentioned.

Signs of the energy business are inescapable in and around Houston — the pipelines, refineries and tankers that crowd the harbor, and the gleaming office towers where oil companies and energy traders have transformed the skyline.

And in a squat glass building on the University of Houston campus, a measure of the industry’s pre-eminence can also be found in the person of Craig Pirrong, a professor of finance, who sits at the nexus of commerce and academia.

As energy companies and traders have reaped fortunes by buying and selling oil and other commodities during the recent boom in the commodity markets, Pirrong has positioned himself as the hard-nosed defender of financial speculators — the combative, occasionally acerbic academic authority to call upon when difficult questions arise in Congress and elsewhere about the multitrillion-dollar global commodities trade.

Do financial speculators and commodity index funds drive up prices of oil and other essentials, ultimately costing consumers? Since 2006, Pirrong has written a flurry of influential letters to federal agencies arguing that the answer is an emphatic no. He has testified before Congress to that effect, hosted seminars with traders and government regulators, and given countless interviews for financial publications absolving Wall Street speculation of any appreciable role in the price spikes.

What Pirrong has routinely left out of most of his public pronouncements in favor of speculation is that he has reaped financial benefits from speculators and some of the largest players in the commodities business, The New York Times has found.

While his university’s financial ties to speculators have been the subject of scrutiny by the news media and others, it was not until last month, after repeated requests by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, that the University of Houston, a public institution, insisted that Pirrong submit disclosure forms that shed some light on those financial ties.

Interviews with dozens of academics and traders, and a review of hundreds of emails and other documents involving two highly visible professors in the commodities field — Pirrong and Scott Irwin at the University of Illinois — show how major players on Wall Street and elsewhere have been aggressive in underwriting and promoting academic work.

The efforts by the financial players, the interviews show, are part of a sweeping campaign to beat back regulation and shape policies that affect the prices that people around the world pay for essentials like food, fuel and cotton.

Pirrong’s research was cited extensively by the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by Wall Street interests in 2011 that for two years has blocked the limits on speculation that had been approved by Congress as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. During that same time period, Pirrong has worked as a paid research consultant for one of the lead plaintiffs in the case, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, according to his disclosure form.

Pirrong has been compensated in the last several years by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the commodities trading house Trafigura, the Royal Bank of Scotland and a handful of companies that speculate in energy, according to the disclosure forms.

The disclosure forms do not require Pirrong to reveal how much money he made from his consulting work. When asked about the financial benefits of his outside activities, Pirrong replied, “That’s between me and the IRS.”

Debating to a stalemate

No one disputes that a substantial portion of price increases in oil and food over the last decade were caused by fundamental market factors: increased demand from China and other industrializing countries, extreme weather, currency fluctuations and the diversion of grain to biofuel.

But so much speculative money poured into markets — from $13 billion in 2003 to $317 billion at a peak in 2008 — that many economists say that the flood became a factor of its own in distorting prices.

Others assert that commodities markets have historically gone through intermittent price bubbles and that the most recent gyrations were not caused by the influx of speculative money. Pirrong has also argued that the huge inflow of Wall Street money may actually lower costs by decreasing what commodities producers pay to manage their risk.

Pirrong and the University of Houston are not alone in publicly defending speculation while accepting financial help from speculators. Other researchers have received funding or paid consulting jobs courtesy of major commodities traders including AIG Financial Products, banks including the Bank of Canada or financial industry groups like the Futures Industry Association.

One of the most widely quoted defenders of speculation in agricultural markets, Irwin of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, consults for a business that serves hedge funds, investment banks and other commodities speculators, according to information received by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act.

Pirrong, Irwin and other scholars say that financial considerations have not influenced their work. But ethics experts say that when academics fail to disclose financial ties, they do a disservice to the public and undermine the perception of impartiality.

“If those that are creating the culture around financial regulation also have a significant, if hidden, conflict of interest, our public is not likely to be well served,” said Gerald Epstein, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Speculation in the market

Financial speculators are investors who bet on price swings without any intention of taking delivery of the physical commodity. They can help smooth the volatility of the market by adding capital, spreading risk and offering buyers and sellers a kind of price insurance. But an assortment of studies by academics, congressional committees and consumer advocate groups found evidence suggesting that a wave of speculation that accelerated in 2003 had essentially overwhelmed the market.

As gasoline topped $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008, Congress tried to soothe angry motorists by pushing for restrictions on oil speculation.

Pirrong jumped into the fray with his trademark tenaciousness.

When oil company executives, traders and investment banks cited speculation as a major cause of surging prices which, by some estimates, was costing U.S. consumers more than $300 billion a year, Pirrong dutifully contradicted them.

Over the years, Pirrong has resisted releasing details of his own financial dealings with speculators, and when The Times first requested his disclosure forms in March, the University of Houston said none were required of him. The disclosure forms Pirrong ultimately filed in November indicate that since 2011, he has been paid for outside work involving 11 clients. Some fees are for his work as an expert witness, testifying in court cases on behalf of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and a bank and a company that makes futures-trading software. The commodities firm Trafigura contracted him to conduct a research project.

When asked about Pirrong’s disclosure, Richard Bonnin, a university spokesman said only that all employees were given annual training on the school’s policy, which requires researchers to report paid outside consultant work.

Professors as pitchmen

Concerns about academic conflicts of interest have become a major issue among business professors and economists since the financial crisis. In 2010, the documentary “Inside Job” blasted a handful of prominent academic economists who did not reveal Wall Street’s financial backing of studies which, in some cases, extolled the virtues of financially unsound assets. Two years later, the American Economic Association adopted tougher disclosure standards.

Even with the guidelines, however, financial firms have been able to use the resources and credibility of academia to shape the political debate.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, for example, at times blur the line between research and public relations.

The exchange’s public relations staff has helped Irwin shop his pro-speculation essays to newspaper op-ed pages, according to emails reviewed by The Times. His studies, writings, videotaped speeches and interviews have been prominently displayed on the exchange’s website and an online magazine run by the exchange.

A spokesman for the exchange said Irwin was just one of a “large and growing pool of esteemed academics, governmental editors and editors in the mainstream press” whose work it follows and posts on its various publications. While the CME has given more than $1.4 million to the University of Illinois since 2008, most has gone to the business school and none to the School of Agriculture and Consumer Economics, where Irwin teaches.