As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Josefin Meyer, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
She will present her work, joint with Angélica Domínguez-Cardoza and Lucie Stoppok, titled Global Commodity Markets and Sovereign Risk across 150 Years.
Abstract: How do commodity price movements affect sovereign default risk over the long-run? Using a novel dataset covering 41 countries and 42 raw commodities, we take a comprehensive long-run view to shed light on this so far understudied relationship between commodity risk and sovereign risk across 150 years. We create a novel country-specific commodity price index that allows us to take advantage of countries' variation in their commodity export compositions. Our results are twofold: first, commodity price fluctuations show a persistent association with sovereign borrowing costs for countries that are commodity export dependent across the last one and a half centuries. Second, historically this relationship was driven by agricultural price movements; today it is driven by mineral and energy price movements.
About the speaker
Josefin Meyer is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. She studied economics at the Hamburg University and Free University of Berlin and holds a PhD in Public Economics from the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich (LMU). She was a Research Fellow at the Department of Economics of Sciences Po and a Research Associate at the Department of Economics of LMU. Her research interests are international finance, sovereign deb, as well as financial and economic history.