Soaring commodity prices in 2007 and 2008 raised concerns that volatility was also rising, which would have implications for welfare and therefore for the design of public policy interventions. The literature focuses on trends in commodity prices rather than their volatility characteristics....

I propose a state-space approach to test for international risk sharing at different horizons. Running the tests on US data <italic>vis-à-vis</italic> the rest of the world, I find that market incompleteness is pervasive: the null is rejected at all horizons.

During a natural disaster, the negative supply shock due to the destruction of productive capacity is counteracted by a positive demand shock due to public grants for assistance and reconstruction positing an identification issue in empirical work. Focusing on the 2009 'Aquilano' earthquake in...

I analyze the perfect risk-sharing condition in the time–frequency domain using wavelets. Some countries engage more in risk-sharing at specific frequencies while others at all frequencies, but only for a short period of time. Increasing degree of risk-sharing over time is visible only for the...

Although earthquakes are large idiosyncratic shocks for affected regions, little is known of their impact on economic activity. Seismic events are rare, the data is crude (the Richter scale measures the magnitude but says nothing of the associated damages) and counterfactuals are often entirely...

Argentina's government has resorted to fiscal policy as a countercyclical tool to mitigate the negative impact of the current economic downturn on aggregate demand. Empirical results based on a vector error correction model suggest, however, that the fiscal multiplier is relatively small and...

I study the asset approach to exchange rates in the time--frequency domain. Using Australian data, I show that the Granger causality runs from the exchange rate to commodity prices -- a proxy for economic fundamentals. This result holds at any point in time at business cycle and higher...

During a natural disaster, the negative supply shock due to the destruction of productive capacity is counteracted by a positive demand shock due to public grants for assistance and reconstruction, positing an identification issue in empirical work. Focusing on the 2009 ’Aquilano’ earthquake...

A law issued to allocate reconstruction grants following the 2009 "Aquilano" earthquake has resulted in a large and unanticipated discontinuity across municipalities with comparable damages. Using diff-in-diff analysis we estimate the "local spending" and the "local tax" multipliers--according...

The author presents evidence that balance sheet effects are critical determinants of both the likelihood of a crisis and of income losses following a crisis. She tests the validity of"insurance"and"liquidity"models of currency crisis. Both models predict that the occurrence of a balance of...