Over the past decade, Indonesia has developed into an important regional and global economy, as well as an active participant in the G20. The chapters in this book document the substantial improvements in the quality of macroeconomic policy that Indonesia has achieved, while also clearly laying...

This paper studies the volatility of commodity prices on the basis of a large dataset of monthly prices observed in international trade data from the United States over the period 2002 to 2011. The conventional wisdom in academia and policy circles is that primary commodity prices are more...

In this paper we assess the implications of precautionary savings for global imbalances by considering a world economy model composed by the US, the Euro Area, Japan, China, oil-exporting countries, and the rest of the world. These areas are assumed to differ only with respect to GDP volatility...

We study equity price volatility in general equilibrium with news shocks about future productivity and monetary policy. As West (1988) shows, in a partial equilibrium present discounted value model, news about the future cash flow reduces asset price volatility. We show that introducing news...

This paper finds a negative relationship between the employment share of the service sector and the volatility of aggregate output in the OECD—after controlling for the level of financial development. This result reflects volatility differentials across sectors: labor productivity is more...

We present empirical evidence that the Thai baht’s value is driven in part by investors’ cross-border equity portfolio rebalancing decisions. Our results are based on comprehensive datasets of FX and stock market transactions undertaken by nonresident investors in Thailand in 2005 and 2006....

The literature on leverage until now shows how an increase in volatility reduces leverage. However, in order to explain pro-cyclical leverage it assumes that bad news increases volatility. This paper suggests a reason why bad news is more often than not associated with higher future volatility....

This paper studies the volatility of consumption relative to output in the context of a simple general equilibrium model of a small open economy subject to exogenous shocks in productivity. With infinite horizons and exogenous relative prices, the model generates variance estimates that are well...

Volatility in financial markets has forced economists to reexamine the validity of the efficient markets hypothesis, and new empirical approaches have been applied to the study of this important issue in recent years. Many of the recent studies have found evidence of excessive volatility. In the...

This paper examines the impact of changes in margin requirements on returns, transaction volumes, and price volatility of Nikkei 225 futures on the Osaka Securities Exchange (OSE) and the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX). An increase in margin requirement on one exchange is...