The behavior of commodities is critical for developing and developed countries alike. This paper contributes to the empirical evidence on the co-movement and determinants of commodity prices. Using nonstationary panel methods, the authors document a statistically significant degree of...

In early January 2003, the United States and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua launched official negotiations for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a treaty that would expand NAFTA-style trade barrier reductions to Central America. With deeper trade...

The authors apply regime-switching methods to a monetarist model of exchange rates and identify well-defined intervention policy cycles. The policy response indices include a standard exchange market pressure-based index and a model-based volatility ratio that is endogenized relative to Japan,...

In this paper, we reexamine the long-standing and puzzling correlation between national saving and investment in industrial countries. We apply an econometric methodology that allows us to separate idiosyncratic correlation at the country level from correlation at the global level. In a major...

Monetary policy of the European Monetary Union targets aggregate euro area inflation. Concerns are growing that a focus on aggregate inflation may cause national inflation rates to diverge. While different explanations for diverging aggregate euro area inflation have been brought forward, the...

This paper provides a new perspective of fiscal sustainability and financial globalization in emerging and industrial countries. We highlight the importance of global capital market shocks for fiscal sustainability, a relationship which has hitherto been ignored in the empirical literature....

This article operates at the interface of the literature on the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on host countries and the literature on the determinants of institutional quality. We argue that FDI contributes to economic development by improving institutional quality in the host...

Deeper trade integration between Central America and the United States, as envisaged under the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is likely to lead to closer links between Central American and U.S. business cycles. This article assesses the degree of business cycle synchronization between...