This paper revisits the extent of seasonality in African livelihoods, which has disappeared from Africa's development debate. Through econometric analysis of monthly food price series across 100 locations in three countries during 2000-12, it is shown that seasonal movements in maize wholesale...

International commodity agreements (ICAs) fit uneasily in a world in which markets are becoming globalized and increasingly competitive. Development policy - both as preached by international agencies and as practiced by typically democratically elected and nonsocialist governments in the major...

Textbook discussions of discrete choice modelling focus on binomial and multinomial choice models in which agents select a single response. We consider the situation of non-exclusive multinomial choice. The widely used Marginal Logit Model imposes independence and has other disadvantages. We...

Dynamic representation of spot and three‐month aluminum and copper volatilities is considered. Aluminum and copper are the two most important metals traded in the London Metal Exchange. They share common business cycle factors and are traded under identical contract specifications. The...

An extended version of the S. Beveridge and C. R. Nelson (1981) decomposition and a latent variable approach are used to examine how the noise content, and therefore the informativeness, of four aluminum prices that have been quoted at various times since 1970—the (now defunct) U.S. producer...

The global population is forecasted to reach 9.4 billion by 2050, with much of this increase concentrated in developing regions and cities. Ensuring adequate food and nourishment to this large population is a pressing economic, moral and even security challenge and requires research (and action)...

Plenary presentation from 123rd EAAE Seminar, 23-24 February, Dublin, Ireland

The paper examines the impact of changes in the positions of financial actors on the volatilities of Chicago grains and vegetable oil prices using a GARCH-X framework within which a variant of Granger-causality tests can be performed. The paper analyses both the position data in the post-2006...

We use contemporaneous causality tests based on instrumental variables (IV) methods to re-examine causality from Commodity Index Trader positions to agricultural futures prices. A number of recent studies found that no Granger-causal impacts are discernible for agricultural commodity markets....