Global monetary conditions are often cited as a driver of commodity prices. This paper investigates the empirical relationship between US monetary policy and commodity prices by means of a standard VAR system, commonly used in analysing the effects of monetary policy shocks. The results suggest...

We evaluate the macroeconomic effects of shocks specific to the oil market, which mainly reflect fluctuations in precautionary demand for oil driven by uncertainty about future supplies. A two-stage identification procedure is used. First, daily changes in the futures-spot spread proxy for...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effects on the U.S. economy of news about oil supply by estimating a VAR. Information contained in daily quotations of oil futures contracts is exploited to estimate the dynamic path of oil prices following a shock. Hence, differently from the VAR literature...

From a financial standpoint, the mechanics of the carry trade has been recently examined in Brunnermeier et al. (2009). They showed that shocks to interest rate differentials lead to carry trade activity and to significant reactions in the bilateral exchange rates vis-a-vis the US dollar that...

The paper analyses the financial structure of the private sector in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland and assesses its implications for the monetary transmission mechanism. The financial accounts of these countries provide a picture of a private sector which is predictably financially less...

We assess the global macroeconomic implications of different strategies of official reserve management by developing a large scale new-Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium model of the world economy, calibrated on the euro area, the United States, China, Japan and the rest of the world. An...

Recent studies warn that the U.S. economy may return to a phase of secular stagnation. In the next 20 to 50 years, U.S. economic growth will be negatively affected by lower contributions of hours worked and education. But some studies also add that productivity could decelerate sharply and that...

This paper argues that the lack of timely and decisive policy action to correct domestic and external imbalances contributed crucially to the build-up of financial excesses that led to the financial crisis and the Great Recession. We focus on 2002-07 and perform a number of counterfactual...

We introduce a novel methodology to measure the relative TFP of the tradeable sector across countries, based on the relationship between trade and TFP in the model of Eaton and Kortum (2002). The logic of our approach is to measure TFP not from its "primitive" (the production function) but from...

We analyze the foundations of the relationship between trade and total factor productivity (TFP) in the Ricardian model. Under general assumptions about the autarky distributions of industry productivities, trade openness raises TFP. This is due to the selection effect of international...