The idea that wages rise relative to alternatives as job seniority accumulates is the foundation of the theory of specific human capital, as well as other widely accepted theories of compensation. The fact that persons with longer job tenures typically earn higher wages tends to support these...

We employ a large dataset of physical inventory data on 21 different commodities for the period 1993-2011 to empirically analyze the behaviour of commodity prices and their volatility as predicted by the theory of storage. We examine two main issues. First, we analyze the relationship between...

Risks related to commodity price volatility are a major thread to actors in commodity chains, particularly to smallholder farmers in low income countries. Therefore, price setting and transmission within global commodity chains are of crucial importance from a developmental and distributional...

Money manager capitalism - characterized by highly leveraged funds seeking maximum returns in an environment that systematically underprices risk - has resulted in a series of boom-and-bust cycles in equities, real estate, and commodities. Because subsequent cycles have been increasingly...

The functioning of commodity markets has changed related to processes of financialization that involve two major developments - the rise of financial interest on commodity derivative markets through the increasing presence of financial investors and the changing business models of international...

This study investigates the effects of oil price shocks on volatility of selected agricultural and metal commodities. To achieve this goal, we decompose an oil price shock to its underlying components, including macroeconomics and oil specific shocks. The applied methodology is the structural...

The decline in commodity prices that began with metals and agriculture four years ago—joined by crude oil in mid-2014—continued in 2015Q1 (Figure 1). Energy, metals, and agricultural prices were down 28, 11, and 5 percent, respectively, from the previous quarter. Increasing supplies, bumper...