There is a common perception that the prices of unrelated commodities move together. This paper re-examines this notion, using a measure of co-movement of economic time series called concordance. Concordance measures the proportion of time that the prices of two commodities are concurrently in...

This paper examines the optimality of international capital flows to a persistent net importer of capital, Australia, during its post-capital-controls period 1984-98. The results suggest that international capital flows were larger than optimal during the 1980s, but in the 1990s such flows have...

This paper investigates empirically the degree of international integration of industrial and emerging country equity markets. It analyzes two issues: first, the extent to which equity prices have tended to move similarly across countries and regions in the long run; and second, the strength of...

The issue of informational efficiency in the evolution of asset prices is examined using data on equity markets in Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan over the period 1986-93. The analysis is carried out in two steps. The parameters of agents` dynamic consumption and investment decisions are first...

There is a common perception that the prices of unrelated commodities move together. This paper re-examines this notion, using a measure of comovement of economic time series called concordance. Concordance measures the proportion of time that the prices of two commodities are concurrently in...

This paper examines the duration and magnitude of commodity-price cycles. It finds that for most commodities, price slumps last longer than price booms. How far prices fall in a slump is found to be slightly larger than how far they rebound in a subsequent boom. There is little evidence of a...

Using the longest dataset publicly available (The Economist's index of industrial commodity prices), we analyze the behavior of real commodity prices over the period 1862-99, and have two main findings. First, while there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of 13 percent per year...

Since the Australian dollar was floated in December 1983, the Australian central bank (Reserve Bank of Australia) has actively intervened in the foreign exchange market. Using daily exchange rate and official intervention data from January 1984 to December 2001, this paper examines what effects,...

This paper uses a Binary Classification Tree (BCT) model to analyze banking crises in 50 emerging market and developing countries during 1990-2005. The BCT identifies key indicators and their threshold values at which vulnerability to banking crisis increases. The three conditions identified as...

This paper examines whether the real exchange rates of commodity-exporting countries and the real prices of their commodity exports move together over time. Using IMF data on the world prices of 44 commodities and national commodity export shares, we construct new monthly indices of national...