With a constant new stream of financial services coming to the market, each often more exotic and complicated than the last, the financial services industry, which includes commodity derivatives exchanges, brokerage houses and banks providing price risk reduction services (the so-called hedging services), is one of the fastest growing industries. In order to assure survival, these companies sho...

Commodity currency literature recently stressed the importance of commodity prices as a determinant of real exchange rates in developing countries (Cashin, Cespedes and Sahay 2004). We provide new empirical evidence on this issue by focusing on countries which are specialized in the ex-port of one leading commodity. For those countries, we investigate to which extent their real exchange rate is...

We study market games with multiple posts per commodity. We provide some facts that characterize prices of commodities across posts and show the following results: (i) As the number of agents increases, the price variability across posts for a commodity becomes smaller and it becomes zero when the number of agents becomes infinite, irrespectively of the distribution of characteristics in the ec...

This paper documents a new " stylized fact " regarding commodity prices using alternative datasets covering the period from 1880 to 1996: The volatility of real commodity prices, defined as nominal commodity prices deflated by the manufacturing unit value index, is higher under flexible-exchange rate regimes than fixed-exchange rate regimes. Furthermore, changes in exchange regime are associate...

Introduction Focus: Early (800-1500) commodity money systems (coins) Introduction Stylized facts about evolution of commodity money systems: 1 Started with a single silver coin Initially same size across countries Over time, debased in some countries, not debased in others 2 Next added a second silver coin If original silver coin small, then new silver coin larger If original silver coin large,...

One view, argued by Williams (2000), is that Marx simply made a ‘category mistake’ when he introduced commodity money into his theory of value. If money is fully determined by its social functions in capitalism then the physical characteristics assumed by money become historically contingent so that ‘commodity-money is necessary neither to the logic of Marx’s system nor to the logic of capitali...

We study global properties of the equilibrium set of economies with a continuous consumption space. This framework is important in intertemporal allocation problems (continuous or infinite time), financial markets with uncertainty (continuous states of nature) and commodity differentiation. We show that the equilibrium set is contractible which implies that (i) there is a continuous economic po...