In this paper we study how differences in the quality of countries' institutions affect the impact of natural hazards in these countries. To do so, we first build a new data set that allows us to adequately control for countries' development and geological characteristics and, importantly,...

We introduce a new approach to measuring the possible impact of futures speculation on spot commodity prices. We advocate the use of a non-parametric, highly flexible empirical model for measuring this impact, in order to account for possible non-linearity in the transmission from futures to...