Major resource discoveries have transformed growth prospects for many low-income countries. However, the sharp downturn in commodity prices in recent years is affecting resource investment in these countries, and may delay the development of recent discoveries into production. This study...

This paper provides an overview of the impact that one-time changes in commodity and other prices have on household welfare. It begins with a collection of stylized facts related to commodities based on household survey data from Latin America and Africa. The data uncovers strong commodity...

This note documents a curious finding about the substantial forecast ability of a simple aggregator of three commodity futures prices for U.S. core inflation. The proposed aggregator reduces the out-of-sample root mean squared error for 12-month-ahead inflation forecasts of the benchmark AR(1)...

Using official national-level survey data, we investigate the impact of a large debt waiver program in India on beneficiaries savings and consumption. We find that the household consumption level and pattern are unaffected by the waiver. Plausibly anticipating higher credit constraints in the...

Income growth in emerging economies has often been cited as a key driver of the past decade?s com-modity price boom?the longest and broadest boom since World War II. This paper shows that income has a negative and highly significant effect on real food commodity prices, a finding that is...

In order to study whether public pension systems displace private saving, we use the quasi-experimental variation in pension wealth created by Poland's 1999 pension reform. Using the 1997-2003 Polish Household Budget Surveys, we begin by estimating “difference-in-differences” regressions,...

This paper revisits and expands the evidence on the impact of trade shocks on intra-state conflict with a large sample of developing countries in the 1960-2010 period. The results suggest that increases in the prices of a country's exported commodities raise the country's risk of civil conflict...

We uncover stylized facts of commodity futures price and volatility dynamics in the post-financialization period and find a factor structure in daily commodity volatility that is much stronger than the factor structure in returns. The common factor in commodity volatility relates to stock market...

This paper provides an overview of the impact of once-and-for-all changes in commodity prices and other prices on household welfare. It begins with a collection of stylized facts related to commodities based on household survey data from Latin America and Africa. The data uncover strong...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the degree of co-movement among the nominal price returns of 11 major energy, agricultural and food commodities based on monthly data between 1970 and 2013. A uniform-spacings testing approach, a multivariate dynamic conditional correlation model...