Many developing economies are heavily exposed to commodity markets, leaving them vulnerable to the vagaries of international commodity prices. This paper examines the use of commodity options, including plain vanilla, risk reversal, and barrier options, to hedge such risks. It then proposes the...

This paper investigates the determinants of swap spreads. Compared with previous work done in this area, such as the seminal paper by Duffie and Singleton (1997), the paper includes daily credit spreads data in the time series framework. The issue is whether “liquidity” or “credit” (or...

In this paper we investigate the dynamics of Hong Kong cap-floor volatilities and compare their dynamics with the US cap-floor volatilities. We use linear and non-linear factor models and VAR¡¦s. The results show that the first principal components, both linear and non-linear, do a very good...

Estimating and pricing correlation of credit deterioration is difficult, but can be handled with standard notions of correlation. The same however is not true for default events. The notion of correlation that one needs to use in dealing with credit default is fundamentally different from the...

This paper constructs a financial conditions index for Poland to explore the link between financial conditions and real economic activity. The index in constructed by applying two complementary approaches—factor analysis and vector auto-regression approach. We evaluate the index’s...

Since the start of the 2008 - 09 financial crisis, the Polish Overnight Index Average (POLONIA) has persistently been below the policy rate, suggesting a limited influence of the NBP’s open market operations on the short-term interbank rate. In this regard, this paper analyzes the...

The paper shows that foreign holdings of local currency government bonds in emerging market countries (EMs) have reduced bond yields but have somewhat increased yield volatility in the post-Lehman period. Econometric analyses conducted from a sample of 12 EMs demonstrate that these results are...