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Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 12.
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Journal Article
Commodity agreements: the haves vs. the have-nots?
Journal Article
A (mild) defense of luxury
Working Paper
Monetary indicators, commodity prices, and inflation
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. ...
Newsletter
Corn and soybean outlook
Journal Article
The simple analytics of commodity futures markets: do they stabilize prices? Do they raise welfare?
This paper uses a simple, graphical approach to analyze what happens to commodity prices and economic welfare when futures markets are introduced into an economy. It concludes that these markets do not necessarily make prices more or less stable. It also concludes that, contrary to common belief, whatever happens to commodity prices is not necessarily related to what happens to the economic welfare of market participants: even when futures markets reduce the volatility of prices, some people can be made worse off. These conclusions come from a series of models that differ in their assumptions ...
Briefing
Do commodity price spikes cause long-term inflation?
This public policy brief examines the relationship between trend inflation and commodity price increases and finds that evidence from recent decades supports the notion that commodity price changes do not affect the long-run inflation rate. Evidence from earlier decades suggests that effects on inflation expectations and wages played a key role in whether commodity price movements altered trend inflation. This brief is based on a memo to the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston as background to a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.
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 ...