Commodities as Collateral

Commodities as Collateral∗

This paper proposes and tests a theory of using commodities as collateral for financing. In the presence of capital control and financial frictions, financial investors import commodities and pledge them as collateral to capture the higher expected return in the importing country. The collateral demand for commodities increases commodity prices globally; it also increases futures risk premium i...

Information Technology as Commodities

This paper is about a model of software delivery known as Software as a Service (SaaS). We believe that companies will pay for software as they pay for electricity and telephone. They will pay for what they use. We present why and when it happened. That it came from the outsourcing idea and became possible by the advances in the Internet. Software retailers will become service provides. The mai...

Externalities as Commodities: Comment

Cosigners as Collateral

We investigate the role of cosigners as collateral using data from a South Indian …nancial institution. Using an exogenous change in the cosigner requirement, we establish a negative causal e¤ ect of cosigners on defaults: an increase in the number of cosigners reduces defaults all else equal. Our results suggest that a one-sixth increase in the number of cosigners reduces the incidence of a de...

Pricing commodities

How should a seller price her goods in a market where each buyer prefers a single good among his desired goods, and will buy the cheapest such good, as long as it is within his budget? We provide efficient algorithms that compute near-optimal prices for this problem, focusing on a commodity market, where the range of buyer budgets is small. We also show that our LP rounding based technique easi...