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...

Imperial chancellor Bismarck's system of social insurance (with its three pillars health, accident and pension insurance) was an important role model for social security systems across Europe and in the US. How the introduction of the German system changed economic expectations and decisions of...

Even though commodity pricing models have been successful in fitting the term structure of futures prices and its dynamics, they do not generate accurate true distributions of spot prices. This paper develops a new approach to calibrate these models using not only observations of oil futures...

We consider a market model that consists of financial investors and producers of a commodity. Producers optionally store some production for future sale and go short on forward contracts to hedge the uncertainty of the future commodity price. Financial investors take positions in these contracts...

This paper provides an overview of the impact that onetime 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...

I examine whether commodity prices have been a contributor to the inflation volatility experienced by the Chilean economy in recent years. First, I show that of all commodities, oil is the most significantly correlated with future inflation and inflationary expectations. Next, I use a Gaussian...