The impressive growth of many African economies during the past decade was highly dependent on booming commodity markets and strong capital inflows, often related to commodities. With commodity prices falling and market expectations pointing to little reversal in the foreseeable future,...

Resource-rich countries face large and persistent shocks, especially coming from volatile commodity prices. Given the severity of the shocks, it would be expected that these countries adopt countercyclical fiscal policies to help shield the domestic economy. Taking advantage of a new dataset...

We investigate how the excess comovement of commodity prices, that is, the correlation in commodity returns after filtering out common fundamental shocks, has changed over the past three decades by developing the smooth-transition dynamic conditional correlation model that can capture long-run...

We review how China has become a dominant influence in global commodity markets due to the economy's size and commodity intensity. We then focus on the emergence of China's credit market as a new influence on commodity prices using a vector autoregression model and recursive identification. We...

Brückner and Ciccone (2010) find that there is a higher probability of the outbreak of civil war in Sub-Sahara Africa following downturns in the international commodity prices of the countries' main traded commodities. I use R to replicate their results which yields identical estimates but...

We study the returns to a simple trend following strategy in commodity futures markets and their drivers. Returns correlate positively to calendar spread liquidity and constraints on intermediation capital. The strategy delivers low annualized excess returns in the period from 1990 to 2004 of...

The global economy is highly dependent on commodity prices, which are, by and large, the outcome of market-specific supply and demand fundamentals. As a result, driven by different determinants, financial assets and commodity prices should be negligibly correlated. However, systematically...

This paper examines how speculative futures trading affects commodity markets in terms of price impacts, volatility, and market quality. Contrary to the popular belief that speculators are responsible for the recent commodity price fluctuation, my analysis finds no evidence that speculators...

Dans cet article nous analysons l'impact de la volatilité des prix des matières premières sur les recettes fiscales des pays en développement, alors que la littérature s'est principalement concentrée sur son effet sur la croissance économique. Notre analyse quantitative porte sur 80 pays...