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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 ...
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 ...
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.
Journal Article
Commodity agreements: the haves vs. the have-nots?
Journal Article
Commodity crunch
Journal Article
A (mild) defense of luxury
Working Paper
Monetary indicators, commodity prices, and inflation
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
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 ...