An influential literature shows that product quality varies widely across countries and industries. In this paper, we propose and test an explanation that rests on the interplay between cross-country differences in financial frictions and cross-industry differences in financial vulnerability. We...

The 2015 workshop on “Recent evolutions of oil and commodity prices”, organized by FEEM, focused on the sharp decline in the oil price in 2014. High crude oil production and slower demand growth explain a large fraction of the current low level of prices, but a complex set of factors is...

This paper evaluates how different types of speculation affect the volatility of commodities' futures prices. We adopt four indexes of speculation: Working's T, the market share of non-commercial traders, the percentage of net long speculators over total open interest in future markets, which...

This paper evaluates how different types of speculation affect the volatility of commodities' futures prices. We adopt four indexes of speculation: Working's T, the market share of non-commercial traders, the percentage of net long speculators over total open interest in future markets, which...