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Journal Article
Monetary policy and commodity futures
This paper constructs daily measures of the real interest rate and expected inflation using commodity futures prices and the term structure of Treasury yields. We find that commodity futures markets respond to surprise increases in the federal funds rate target by raising the inflation rate expected over the next 3 to 9 months. There is no evidence that the real interest rate responds to surprises in the federal funds target. The data from the commodity futures markets are highly volatile; we show that one can substantially reduce the noise using limited information estimators such as the ...
Report
Indivisibilities, lotteries, and sunspot equilibria
We analyze economies with indivisible commodities. There are two reasons for doing so. First, we extend and provide new insights into sunspot equilibrium theory. Finite competitive economies with perfect markets and convex consumption sets do not allow sunspot equilibria; these same economies with nonconvex consumption sets do, and they have several properties that can never arise in convex environments. Second, we provide a reinterpretation of the employment lotteries used in contract theory and in macroeconomic models with indivisible labor. We show how socially optimal employment lotteries ...
Report
Globalization and the gains from variety
Since the seminal work of Krugman, product variety has played a central role in models of trade and growth. In spite of the general use of love-of-variety models, there has been no systematic study of how the import of new varieties has contributed to national welfare gains in the United States. In this paper, we show that the unmeasured growth in product variety from U.S. imports has been an important source of gains from trade over the last three decades (1972-2001). Using extremely disaggregated data, we show that the number of imported product varieties has increased by a factor of four. ...
Journal Article
Commodity agreements: the haves vs. the have-nots?
Newsletter
Corn and soybean outlook
Journal Article
A (mild) defense of luxury
Working Paper
Does commodity money eliminate the indeterminacy of equilibria?
Previous studies have shown that a random-matching model with divisible at money and without constraint on agents' money inventories possesses a continuum of stationary single-price equilibria. Wallace [7] conjectured that the indeterminacy can be eliminated by the use of commodity money, just as the elimination of the contin- uum of dynamic (non-stationary) equilibria in models such asoverlapping generation or infnite-horizon money-in-utility-function. In contrast, I and that in a similar random-matching model with dividend-yielding commodity money, a continuum of stationary single-price ...
Journal Article
Commodity crunch
Working Paper
Monetary indicators, commodity prices, and inflation