In the long view, recent grain price volatility is not anomalous. Wheat, rice, and maize are highly substitutable in the global market for calories, and when aggregate stocks decline to minimal feasible levels, prices become highly sensitive to small shocks, consistent with storage models. In...

Structural time series analysis, which requires no prior assumptions regarding stationarity and allows for a wide variety of behavior, reveals that the net barter terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactures has a negative deterministic trend over this century as hypothesized by...

The entire Bolivian tax system is in need of thoroughgoing reform. A series of ad hoc adjustments in the system over the years, primarily made in response to recurring short-run fiscal emergencies, has yielded a patchwork overall tax structure that is not only chronically unable to satisfy...

This report presents the short- and long-run behavior of primary commodity prices and the implications of movements in these prices for developing countries. Most earlier studies of the long-term trend in the net barter terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactures have suffered...

We prove the strict concavity of the value function for liquidity-constrained saving or storage models with possibly responsive effort, possibly unbounded marginal utility, and i.i.d. disturbances. Thus we furnish a foundation for empirical estimation of homogeneous Markov processes for...

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the possible use of credit derivatives by corporate treasurers. Corporations have, in recent years, grown comfortable with the idea of using traditional derivative products to hedge their exposure to, for example, interest rate and foreign exchange risk....