Dynamic factor models and external instrument identification are two recent advances in the empirical macroeconomic literature. This paper combines the two approaches in order to study the effects of monetary policy shocks. I use this novel framework to re-examine the effects found by Forni and...

We examine the effect of pandemics on selected commodity prices-in particular, those of zinc, copper, lead, and oil. We set up a vector autoregressive model and analyse data since the mid-nineteenth century to determine how prices reacted to pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish Flu, 1957 Asian...

Since December 2019 we have been living with the virus known as SARS-CoV-2, a situation which has led to health policies being given prevalence over economic ones and has caused a paralysis in the demand for raw materials for several months due to the number confinements put in place around the...

In this paper we extract latent factors from a large cross-section of commodity prices, including fuel and non-fuel commodities. We decompose each commodity price series into a global (or common) component, block-specific components and a purely idiosyncratic shock. We find that the bulk of the...