This paper summarizes recent empirical research on the determinants of subjective well-being. Results from national and international samples suggest that measures of social capital, including especially the corollary measures of specific and general trust, have substantial effects on well-being...

This paper provides a quantitative general equilibrium evaluation of the repeal of Britain’s Corn Laws in 1846, the signature trade policy event of the nineteenth century. In studying the impact of abolishing the import duty on wheat, our framework highlights (a) the large open economy impact...

Motivated by the literature on limits-to-arbitrage, we build an equilibrium model of commodity markets in which speculators are capital constrained, and commodity producers have hedging demands for commodity futures. Increases (decreases) in producers' hedging demand (speculators' risk-capacity)...

This paper finds that, concurrent with the rapid growing index investment in commodities markets since early 2000s, futures prices of different commodities in the US became increasingly correlated with each other and this trend was significantly more pronounced for commodities in the two popular...

This paper analyzes the joint responses of commodity futures prices and traders' futures positions to changes in the VIX before and after the recent financial crisis. We find that while financial traders accommodate the needs of commercial hedgers in normal times, in times of distress, financial...

If commercial producers or financial investors use futures contracts to hedge against commodity price risk, the arbitrageurs who take the other side of the contracts may receive compensation for their assumption of nondiversifiable risk in the form of positive expected returns from their...

High and volatile prices of major commodities have generated a wide array of analyses and policy prescriptions, including influential studies identifying price bubbles in periods of high volatility. Here we consider a model of the market for a storable commodity in which price expectations are...

This paper analyzes whether commodity futures prices traded in the United States reveal information relevant to stock prices of East Asian economies including China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. We find significant and positive predictive powers of overnight futures returns of...

The large inflow of investment capital to commodity futures markets in the last decade has generated a heated debate about whether financialization distorts commodity prices. Rather than focusing on the opposing views concerning whether investment flows either did or did not cause a price...