There is a common perception that the prices of unrelated commodities move together. This paper re-examines this notion, using a measure of co-movement of economic time series called concordance. Concordance measures the proportion of time that the prices of two commodities are concurrently in...

There is a common perception that the prices of unrelated commodities move together. This paper re-examines this notion, using a measure of comovement of economic time series called concordance. Concordance measures the proportion of time that the prices of two commodities are concurrently in...

This paper examines the duration and magnitude of commodity-price cycles. It finds that for most commodities, price slumps last longer than price booms. How far prices fall in a slump is found to be slightly larger than how far they rebound in a subsequent boom. There is little evidence of a...