This paper proposes a monetary model with firm entry as a means for alleviating the difficulties of real business cycle models in reproducing the smoothness and persistence of macroeconomic variables together with the volatility of profits and markups. Simulations show that my baseline model...

After the huge rise and fall of agricultural commodity spot and futures prices between 2007 and 2008, the potential reasons for and the impact of the strong rise in volatility provoked an intensive debate in the media as well as in the academic literature. However, owing to the increasing...

Based on multivariate Markov-switching models, this paper presents new results on the interactions between global imbalances, credit spreads, housing markets, macroeconomic variables, commodities and equities during Q1-1987/Q1-2011. We show that rising global imbalances and the uncontrolled...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the spot and futures prices of energy commodities from a new perspective. Taking data from the Dow Jones UBS Commodity Index, we first test for a long-run relationship between spot and futures prices. As a second step, smooth transition models are...