Food price bubbles are a phenomenon in which the cost of some food items or commodities climbs quickly and unreasonably before collapsing due to reasons such as speculation, supply demand imbalances, meteorological occurrences, governmental actions. Governments academics keep an eye on prices spot address these bubbles. The aim this paper is analyze bubble despite global slowdown by examining i...

World food prices hit an all-time high in February 2011 and are still almost two and a half times those of 2000. Although three billion people worldwide use seafood as a key source of animal protein, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations-which compiles prices for other major food categories-has not tracked seafood prices. We fill this gap by developing an index of gl...

The paper compares Feinstein’s and Clark’s consumer price and real wage indices for the British industrial revolution. The sources for their weights and component price series are evaluated. While some of Clark’s innovations are improvements, many of his changes degrade the price index. A new price index is developed using the best components of Clark’s and Feinstein’s. This index is much close...

Abstract This paper investigates whether stock-price indices of seventeen emerging markets can be characterized as random walk (unit root) or mean reversion processes. We implement a test that can account for possible structural breaks in the underlying series and is considerably more powerful than standard tests for a random walk. We find that for fourteen countries, stock prices exhibit signi...

The seminal work of Engel (1999) establishes a method for measuring the contributions of traded goods and nontraded goods to the fluctuation of real exchange rates. Two difficulties arise: the assumed price aggregation is likely biased, and the needed data on non-traded goods price is often limited. The present work overcomes these difficulties, as follows. First we generalize Engel’s exchange ...

Analyzing historical data of price indices we find an extraordinary growth phenomenon in several examples of hyper-inflation in which price changes are approximated nicely by double-exponential functions of time. In order to explain such behavior we introduce the general coarse-graining technique in physics, the Monte Carlo renormalization group method, to the price dynamics. Starting from a mi...

For decades, humans have been consuming large quantities of oil, coal and natural gas. Consequently, people must now take responsibility for having participated in productive activities that have caused the emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG) which has damaged the environment and caused problems associated with abnormal weather. Previous studies investigated the relationships between energy and c...