Springer Science and Business Media LLC

The paper explores the linkage between equity and commodity markets, focusing in particular on its evolution over time. It documents that a country's equity market value has significant out-of-sample predictive ability for the future global commodity price index for several primary commodity-exporting countries. The out-of-sample predictive ability of the equity market appears around 2000s. The results are robust to using several control variables as well as firm-level equity data. Finally, the results indicate that exchange rates are a better predictor of commodity prices than equity markets, especially at very short horizons.

What is the response of bank foreign subsidiaries to climate policy in their host countries? This paper finds that global banks with high environmental performance increase their presence in countries after local authorities strengthen their climate-related actions. Through their foreign subsidiaries, these banks expand their credit by up to 5.2 percent following an increase in the one standard deviation in the host country’s climate policy index. Importantly, the paper does not find evidence that banks with low environmental scores exit in response to climate initiatives. The findings show that strengthening climate policy may also have other benefits—in addition to addressing carbon emission reduction, climate-related initiatives also appear to attract foreign capital from lenders with strong preferences for green assets.

We examine the behavior, determinants, and implications of the equilibrium level of the real federal funds rate, interpreted as the long run or steady state value of the real funds rate. We draw three main conclusions. First, the uncertainty around the equilibrium rate is large, and its relationship with trend GDP growth much more tenuous than widely believed. Our narrative and econometric analysis using cross-country data and going back to the 19th century supports a wide range of plausible estimates for the current level of the equilibrium rate, from a little over 0 per cent to the pre-crisis consensus of 2 per cent. Second, a bivariate vector error correction model that looks only to U.S. and world real rates well captures the behavior of U.S. real rates. The model treats real rates as cointegrated unit root processes. As of the end of our sample (2014), the model forecasts the real rate in the U.S. will asymptote to an equilibrium value of a little less than half a percent by 2021. Consistent with our first point, however, confidence intervals around this point estimate are huge. Third, the uncertainty around the equilibrium rate argues for more “inertial” monetary policy than implied by standard versions of the Taylor rule. Our simulations using the Fed staff’s FRB/US model show that explicit recognition of this uncertainty results in a later but steeper normalization path for the funds rate compared with the median “dot” in the FOMC’s Summary of Economic Projections.