– We analyze daily prices of 29 commodities and 2449 stocks, each over a period of ≈ 15 years. We find that the price fluctuations for commodities have a significantly broader multifractal spectrum than for stocks. We also propose that multifractal properties of both stocks and commodities can be attributed mainly to the broad probability distribution of price fluctuations and secondarily to th...

This article addresses the impact of exchange rate volatility on U.S. exports of four forest commodities. Exchange rate volatility is measured by the standard deviation of the growth rate of real effective exchange rate of the U.S. dollar. The nonstationarity of individual time series is explicitly taken into account by employing multivariate cointegration analysis and error correction models. ...

We developed a model to reconstruct the international trade network by considering both commodities and industry sectors in order to study the effects of reduced trade costs. First, we estimated trade costs to reproduce WIOD and NBERUN data. Using these costs, we estimated the trade costs of sector specific trade by types of commodities. We successfully reconstructed sector-specific trade for e...

Classic studies of spot price fluctuations for commodities like cotton and wheat have been interpreted using a power-law probability distribution with exponent alpha inside the Lévy-stable regime (0<alpha<2). In contrast price fluctuations for stocks have been interpreted using a power-law probability distribution with alpha outside the Lévy-stable regime suggesting that stock prices are in a d...

International trade of horticultural commodities is increasingly important in many regions of the world, yet import patterns of key horticultural crops are understudied in the agricultural economics literature. Using data between 1991 and 2005, we estimate the drivers of per capita import demand for six of the most highly traded horticultural commodities. The own price elasticity estimates were...

The development of risk management methodologies for non-gaussian markets relies often on the assumption that the underlying market factors have a gaussian distribution. While advances have been made in the modeling of more general marginal distributions of the risk factors, the modeling of non-gaussian dependence structures is much less advanced. For commodities markets that often exhibit sudd...

This paper presents the optimal strategic asset allocation for investors seeking to hedge inflation risk. Using a vector-autoregressive model, we investigate the optimal choice for an investor with a fixed target real return at different horizons, with shortfall probability constraint. We show that the strategic allocation differs sharply across regimes. In a volatile macroeconomic environment,...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the necessity to posit a specific utility function to describe investor's preferences and it does not impo...

INTRODUCTION Logistics management information system for health commodities remained poorly implemented in most of developing countries. To assess the status of laboratory logistics management information system for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis laboratory commodities in public health facilities in Addis Ababa. METHODS A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted from September 2010-January ...