In an economy with commodity-pairwise trading posts and transaction costs, commodity money is endogenously determined in general equilibrium. Absent double coincidence of wants, the lowtransaction cost commodity (with the narrowest proportional bid/ask price spread) becomes the common medium of exchange. JEL Classification: C62, E40

Executive Summary The lack of market information represents a significant impediment to market access especially for smallholder poor farmers: it substantially increases transaction costs and reduces market efficiency. For any one crop, the marketing chain consists of multiple middlemen, each taking a margin at every stage of the chain, and price variations in space and time are often large and...

Renewable resources from agriculture have the potential to be an attractive alternative source of raw materials for industry. Their efficient use is important, since acreage for cultivation is limited. For such applications, supply planning can pose specific problems for processors of raw materials, because many crops are only seasonally available. Harvest quality and quantity as well as sales ...

The law of one price (LOP) plays an important role as a building block in theories of international trade and exchange rate determination. It also serves as a measure of integration for international commodity markets. The LOP states that in competitive markets after adjustment for transportation costs and trade barriers, identical commodities sold in different countries should sell for the sam...

The article examines whether commodity risk is priced in the cross-section of equity returns. Alongside a long-only equally-weighted portfolio of commodity futures, we employ as an alternative commodity risk factor a term structure portfolio that captures the propensity of commodity futures markets to be backwardated or contangoed. Equity-sorted portfolios with greater sensitivities to the two ...