The past decade has seen a sharp increase in the level and volatility of commodity prices (Graph 1). This has occurred alongside a sharp increase in commodity demand from emerging market economies, but also in parallel with a rapid increase in both commodity derivatives trading and financial investor activity in commodity markets (Domanski and Heath 2007; Dwyer, Gardner and Williams 2011). That...

A sharp increase in the popularity of commodity investing in the past decade has triggered an unprecedented inflow of institutional funds into commodity futures markets. Such financialization of commodities coincided with significant booms and busts in commodity markets, raising concerns of policymakers. In this paper, we explore the effects of financialization in a model that features institut...

Based on the well-known fact that social networks can provide effective mechanisms that help to increase the trust level between two trade partners, we apply a simple game-theoretical framework to derive transaction costs as a high risk of opportunistic behavior in a repeated trade relation determined by the density and size of trading networks. In the empirical part of the paper we apply a two...

The article examines longitudinal trends in expenditures by over 1,200 private firms, finding evidence of punctuated equilibrium—a pattern of change widely interpreted as evidence of stick-slip dynamics in decision-making processes. Levels of punctuation in the private sector closely resemble those observed in studies on public budgeting, suggesting that the private sector is not on average any...

The paper studies the core-Walras equivalence problem in the commodity space framework of Banach spaces, allocations being defined as Pettis integrable functions. In particular, a core-Walras equivalence result for a certain class of commodity spaces is established, without requiring that the commodity space be separable. The class covered by this result includes the Lp(μ) spaces, 1 ≤ p < ∞, μ ...

A well known problem with revealed preference methods is that when data are found to satisfy their restrictions it is hard to know whether this should be viewed as a triumph for economic theory, or a warning that these conditions are so undemanding that almost anything goes. This paper allows researchers to make this distinction. Our approach builds on theoretical support in the form of an axio...

The government of Malawi in 2004 initiated an ICT-based Malawi Agricultural Commodity Exchange (MACE), a market information service project, to improve access by farmers to market information. MACE was intended to improve the efficiency of agricultural markets as part of the strategy to improve food security. This study uses quantitative methods to examine whether MACE has contributed to effici...