The behavior of commodities is critical for developing and developed countries alike. This paper contributes to the empirical evidence on the co-movement and determinants of commodity prices. Using nonstationary panel methods, we document a statistically significant degree of co-movement due to a common factor. Within a Factor Augmented VAR approach, real interest rate and uncertainty, as postulated by a simple asset pricing model, are both found to be negatively related to this common factor. This evidence is robust to the inclusion of demand and supply shocks, which both positively impact on the co-movement of commodity prices.

ABSTRACT. In the literature, the distribution of city size is a controversial issue with two common contenders: the Pareto and the log-normal. While the first is most accredited when the distribution is truncated above a certain threshold, the latter is usually considered a better representation for the untruncated distribution of all cities. In this paper, we reassess the empirical evidence on the best-fitting distribution in relation to the truncation point issue. Specifically, we provide a comparison among four recently proposed approaches and alternative definitions of U.S. cities. Our results highlight the importance to look at issue of the best-fitting distribution together with the truncation issue and provide guidance with respect to the existing tests of the truncation point.

The behavior of commodities is critical for developing and developed countries alike. This paper contributes to the empirical evidence on the co-movement and determinants of commodity prices. Using nonstationary panel methods, we document a statistically significant degree of co-movement due to a common factor. Within a Factor Augmented VAR approach, real interest rate and uncertainty, as postulated by a simple asset pricing model, are both found to be negatively related to this common factor. This evidence is robust to the inclusion of demand and supply shocks, which both positively impact on the co-movement of commodity prices.

This paper uses seemingly unrelated probit techniques to separate the transmission of a crisis due to broadly defined macroeconomic interdependence from contagion due to herding, avoiding some of the caveats of the more traditional cross-correlation approach. We find that pure contagion occurred in a limited number of country pairs generally belonging to the same region. A reduction in speculative pressure can also be identified between countries in different regional blocks. This seems to suggest that after an initial crisis episode, investors tend to discriminate on the basis of location and common macroeconomic weakness or perceived similarity