National Bureau of Economic Research

About: National Bureau of Economic Research is a nonprofit organization based out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Population. The organization has 2626 authors who have published 34177 publications receiving 2818124 citations. The organization is also known as: NBER & The National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Excess Co-Movement of Commodity Prices

Abstract: This paper tests and confirms the existence of a puzzling phenomenon - the prices of largely unrelated raw commodities have a persistent tendency to move together. We show that this comovement of prices is well in excess of anything that can be explained by the common effects of past, current, or expected future values of macroeconomic variables such as inflation, industrial production, interest rates, and exchange rates. These results are a rejection of the standard competitive model of commodity price formation with storage.

The Economics of Private Equity Funds

Abstract: This article analyzes the economics of the private equity industry using a novel model and dataset. We obtain data from a large investor in private equity funds, with detailed records on 238 funds raised between 1993 and 2006. We build a model to estimate the expected revenue to managers as a function of their investor contracts, and we test how this estimated revenue varies across the characteristics of our sample funds. Among our sample funds, about two-thirds of expected revenue comes from fixed-revenue components that are not sensitive to performance. We find sharp differences between venture capital (VC) and buyout (BO) funds. BO managers build on their prior experience by increasing the size of their funds faster than VC managers do. This leads to significantly higher revenue per partner and per professional in later BO funds. The results suggest that the BO business is more scalable than the VC business and that past success has a differential impact on the terms of their future funds. (JEL G10, G20, G24)

On The Behavior of Commodity Prices

Abstract: The classical theory of commodity price determination integrates myopic supply and demand on the one hand with competitive storage (speculation) under rational expectations on the other. Taking into account the fact that inventories mist; be non-negative, this paper derives from the theory testable implications on the behavior of prices, and makes a first attempt to confront these implications with the empirical evidence. The nonlinearities turn out to be a crucial ingredient in matching the stylized facts, particularity the asymmetries and the sharp upward flares that characterize many commodity prices. The model, simple as it is, goes a long way in reproducing the main features of the data for a range of commodities.

Monetary Policy and Bank Lending

Abstract: This paper surveys recent work that relates to the "lending" view of monetary policy transmission. It has three main goals: 1) to explain why it is important to distinguish between the lending and "money" views of policy transmission; 2) to outline the microeconomic conditions that are needed to generate a lending channel; and 3) to review the empirical evidence that bears on the lending view.