In this paper, we show that large inflows into commodity investments, a recent phenomenon known as financialization, has changed the behavior and dependence structure between commodities and the general stock market. The common perception is that the increase in comovements is the result of distressed investors selling both assets during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. We show that financial di...

Asymmetric GARCH models were developped for equity stocks to take into account the larger response of the conditional variance to negative price shocks. We show that these asymmetric GARCH models are also relevant for modelling commodity prices. Contrary to the equity case, positive shocks are the main contributors to the conditional variance of commodity prices. The theory of storage, by relat...

John Stewart’s paper examines arguments for a social explanation of the conceptual categories which Kant and others have posited as the pre-requisite for abstract cognition. Such an explanation would have the advantage of providing a satisfactory alternative to both empiricism, which cannot tell us how we get from the particular to the universal, and Kantian apriorism which does not really offe...

We study the possibility of making social evaluations of allocations independently of individuals’ preferences over unavailable commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We prove impossibility results which suggest that such evaluations encounter difficulties when the ob...

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...

Despite structural limitations in the Bangladesh economy, the export sector performed well throughout the 1990s. The export growth rate of Bangladesh was higher than that of the world and the SAARC countries. However, the balance of trade of Bangladesh was always in deficit and the trade deficit with India is huge. The export share of primary commodities has decreased while that of manufactured...

For money-like informational commodities the notions of architectural adequacy and evolutionary adequacy are proposed as the first two stages of a moneyness maturity hierarchy. Then three classes of informational commodities are distinguished: exclusively informational commodities, strictly informational commodities, and ownable informational commodities. For each class money-like instances of ...

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...