Interest in commodity prices as indicators of consumerprice inflation has ebbed and flowed withthe rise and fall in commodity prices themselves.True to form, as commodity prices have surged inthe last two years (Chart 1), interest in their predictivepower has returned. Inflation hawks point to...

[...]In this study, we use recent historical evidence toexplore one dimension of the broad relationship betweenmarket returns and mutual fund flows: the effect of shorttermmarket returns on mutual fund flows. Research onthis issue has already confirmed high correlations betweenmarket returns and...

[...]We discuss the potential benefits and costs associated withsome of the corporate governance variables for an average firm.However, we stress that all of these variables are ultimately partof a simultaneous system that determines the corporation’svalue and the allocation of such value...

[...]In this article, we provide new evidence of the importance ofthe coordination mechanism that banks use in their normalpayments activity to provide liquidity. We do so by firstoutlining the sources of funding for banks’ payments activity, thus highlighting the role of expected incoming...

The rapid growth of e-commerce and the Internet has led tothe development of new payment mechanisms capableof tapping the Internet’s unique potential for speed andconvenience. A recent and especially successful exampleof such a development is the personal on-line payment:a mechanism that uses...

[...]The purpose of this article is to build on this earlier work, bythe Basel Committee and others, and to consider the issues thatwould have to be addressed in developing a regulatory minimumcapital standard based on banks’ internal credit risk models. Inconducting this exercise, we consider...