Recent experience has given rise to the financialization view: increased trading in commodity fu­tures markets leads to an increase in the level and volatility of spot prices. We construct a large panel data set which includes commodities with and without futures markets. The data do not...

Poor countries are more volatile than rich countries, and we know this volatility impedes their growth. We also know that commodity price volatility is a key source of those shocks. This paper explores commodity and manufactures price over the past three centuries to answer three questions: Has...

The share of U.S. corn production used to produce ethanol increased from 12.4% in the 2004/05 crop year to over 38.5% in the 2010/11 crop year, and remained at that high level in 2011/12. Even after accounting for return of by-products to the feed market, this is a large and persistent new...

We revisit the issue of fiscal procyclicality in commodity-rich nations -commodity republics in the nomenclature of this paper. Since commodity prices are plausibly a main driver of fiscal policy outcomes in these countries, we focus on the behavior of fiscal variables across the commodity...

It is striking how often countries with oil or other natural resource wealth have failed to grow more rapidly than those without. This is the phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. The principle has been borne out in some econometric tests of the determinants of economic performance...

The national terms of trade, defined as the ratio of an export price index to an import price index has been extensively studied empirically. In this paper we construct an alternative measure, which we call the consumption terms of trade. This measure recognizes the fact that consumers and firms...