We show that explicitly modeling primary commodities in an otherwise totally standard incomplete markets open economy model can go a long way in explaining the Mussa puzzle and the Backus-Smith puzzle, two of the main puzzles in the international economics literature.

This paper shows that there is substantial comovement between prices of primary commodities such as oil, aluminum, maize, or copper and real exchange rates between developed economies such as Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom against the US dollar. The production of commodities is then...

Researchers who estimate affine term structure models often impose overidentifying restrictions (restrictions on parameters beyond those necessary for identification) for a variety of reasons. While some of those restrictions seem to have minor effects on the extracted factors and some measures...

We estimate versions of the Nelson-Siegel model of the yield curve of U.S. government bonds using a Markov switching latent variable model that allows for discrete changes in the stochastic process followed by the interest rates. Our modelling approach is motivated by evidence suggesting the...