If rating agencies add no new information to markets, their actions are not a public policy concern. But as rating changes may be anticipated, testing whether ratings add value is not straightforward. This paper argues that ratings and spreads are both noisy signals of fundamentals and suggest...

Up to the financial slump of the second quarter of 2008 commodity prices grew fast for several consecutive years in a highly volatile context. Recent commodity fluctuations have raised both policy concerns and a prolific academic debate. This paper offers a coherent theoretical and empirical...

This paper proposes a new panel model of cross-sectional dependence. The model has a number of potential structural interpretations that relate to economic phenomena such as herding in financial markets. On an econometric level it provides a flexible approach to the modelling of interactions...