Hamilton (2018) suggests that the Kilian (2009) index of global real economic activity is misleading and calls for alternative measures. The problem documented by Hamilton is a consequence of a coding mistake. Specifically, the index of nominal freight rates underlying the Kilian index was...

How do commodity price movements affect sovereign default risk over the long-run? Using a novel dataset covering 41 countries and 42 raw commodities, we take a comprehensive long-run view to shed light on this so far understudied relationship between commodity risk and sovereign risk across 150...

The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining...

We construct a new database which covers production and trade in 136 primary commodities and 24 manufacturing and service sectors for 145 countries. Using this new more granular data, we estimate spillover effects from plausible trade fragmentation scenarios in a new multi-country, multi-sector,...