We investigate the determinants of aggregate commodity returns and establish the following findings. (1) Common predictors of bond and stock returns, such as the short rate and the yield spread, also predict commodity returns. A high yield spread predicts low commodity returns, consistent with commodities being a hedge for market fluctuations. (2) Even controlling for these common predictors, a...

There has been little evidence to support the use of commodity-currency cross-hedges (Demaskey and Pearce, 1998; Benet, 1990; Eaker and Grant, 1987). However, this paper shows that if currencies can be defined as commodity currencies, as per Chen and Rogoff (2003) and Cashin, spedes and Sahay (2002), commoditycurrency cross-hedges are effective and beneficial. Two commodity currencies, the Papu...

This paper is concerned with the problem of mining commodity information from threaded Chinese customer reviews. Chinese online commodity forums, which are developing rapidly, provide a good environment for customers to share reviews. However, due to noises and navigational limitations, it is hard to have a clear view of a commodity from thousands of related reviews. Further more, due to differ...

One of the particular problems facing agribusiness firms is the relationship between commodity price risk (a source of business risk) and debt repayment ability (a source of financial risk). This study examines the use of commodity-linked loans applied to agricultural credits. A commodity-linked loan is a credit instrument whose payoff is contingent on the value of an underlying commodity or po...

This article links key findings from two major research literatures within contemporary development and globalization studies: global commodity/value chains, and world income inequalities. Forging this missing link exposes what I call the “upgrading paradox” within commodity and value chain analysis. The paradox hinges on the disconnect between the global commodity/value chain literature’s focu...

A competitive economy is studied in which sellers o er alternative direct mechanisms to buyers who have private information about their own private use value for the commodity being traded. In addition the commodity has a common value to all buyers, perhaps represented by the future resale value of the commodity. A competitive equilibrium in mechanisms is described. In every such equilibrium it...

The paper presented an intelligent commodity information search model, which integrates semantic retrieval and multi-attribute decision method. First, semantic similarity is computed by constructing semantic vector-space, in order to realize the semantic consistency between retrieved result and customer’s query. Besides, TOPSIS method is also utilized to construct the comparison mechanism of co...

Using the longest dataset publicly available (The Economist’s index of industrial commodity prices), we analyze the behavior of real commodity prices over the period 1862–1999 and have two main findings. First, while there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of about 1 percent per year over the last 140 years, little support is found for a break in the long-run trend decline in c...