Die internationalen Rohstoffmärkte befinden sich seit einigen Jahren in einerPreisrallye. Während private und institutionelle Anleger die gehandelten Warenüberwiegend als Asset-Klasse zur Diversifizierung ihres Portfolios zunutzen versuchen, sind industrielle Unternehmen mit volatilen...

This paper analyses the importance of common factors in shaping non-fuel commodityprice movements for the period 1957-2008. For this purpose, a dynamic factor modelis estimated using Kalman Filtering techniques. Based on this set-up we are able toseparate common and idiosyncratic developments of...

Amid the recent commodity price gyrations, policy makers have become increasinglyconcerned in assessing to what extent oil and food price shocks transmit to theinflationary outlook and the real economy. In this paper, we try to tackle this issue bymeans of a Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR)...

I argue that progress in understanding economic development (as in other branches of economics)must come from the investigation of mechanisms; the associated empirical analysis can usefully employa wide range of experimental and non-experimental methods. I discuss three different areas of...