Resource-rich countries have to manage highly volatile commodity revenues. In periods of revenue booms there is a tendency for large spending scale-ups. When facing large and persistent reductions in commodity prices, some of these countries will need to adjust their budgets to the new reality....

This note assesses empirically the role Chinese activity plays in global commodities markets, showing that the strength of China's economic activity has a significant bearing on commodity prices, but that the impact differs across commodity markets, with industrial production shocks having a...

The term 'financialization' describes the phenomenon that commodity contracts are traded for purely financial reasons and not for motives rooted in the real economy. Recently, financialization has been made responsible for causing adverse welfare effects especially for low-income and low-wealth...

This paper investigates the relationship between household saving and pensions, and estimates both the displacement effect of pensions on private saving and the precautionary saving effect due to uncertainty in pension income. I estimate the savings equation derived from a lifecycle model...

After the destructive impact of the global financial crisis of 2008, many believe that pre-crisis financial market regulation did not take the "big picture" of the system suffciently into account and, subsequently, financial supervision mainly "missed the forest for the trees". As a result, the...

This paper investigates the economic fortunes of coerced vs. free workers in a global supply chain. To identify the differential treatment of otherwise similar workers we resort to a unique exogenous labor demand shock that affects wages in voluntary and involuntary labor relations differently....