Commodity-price comovement and global economic activity

Guided by a macroeconomic model with endogenous commodity prices, we apply a new factor-based identification strategy to decompose the historical sources of changes in commodity prices and global economic activity. The model yields a factor structure for commodity prices and identification conditions that provide an economic interpretation: one factor captures the combined contribution of shocks that affect commodity markets only through general-equilibrium forces. Applied to a cross-section of commodity prices since 1968, the theoretical restrictions are consistent with the data and yield structural interpretations of the common factors in commodity prices. Commodity-related shocks have contributed modestly to global economic fluctuations. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.