We examine the effects of variations in the international food prices on political institutions in low-income countries. Our empirical analysis exploits that the economic impact of changes in the international food prices differs across countries depending on whether countries are net food...

We examine the effect that revenue windfalls from international commodity price booms have on sovereign bond spreads using panel data for 38 emerging market economies during the period 1997-2007. Our main finding is that commodity price booms lead to a significant reduction in the sovereign bond...

This paper presents estimates of the relationship between the share of income accruing to the middle class and gross domestic product per capita of economies from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The increase in gross domestic product per capita that these economies experienced during...

This paper presents estimates of the effects that terms of trade volatility has on growth of real gross domestic product per capita. Based on five-year non-overlapping panel data comprising 175 countries during 1980-2010, the paper finds that: (i) in model specifications that do not include...

The 2007-2008 upsurge in agricultural commodity prices gave rise to widespread concern about investors causing a "global land rush". Large land deals can provide opportunities for better access to capital, transfer of technology, and advances in productivity and employment generation. But they...

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...