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"In the 1860s the writer Theodor Fontane described the relatively short-lived production and trade relationship between the German North Sea and the Havelland, a region southwest of Potsdam. The Havelland supplied shipyards on the Lower Eibe, Weser and jade with high-quality acacia-wood spikes for the construction of large wooden sailing ships until ca. 1890, when that type of ship ceased to be built. There is no documentation of this business relationship in any of the towns in which the respective shipyards operated." (author's abstract)

Beside the mixed evidences on transmission of international food price volatility to local markets and the desirability or otherwise of reliance on stabilisation policy to cushion the effects, very little is known about the key drivers of price spikes and volatility in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper is an attempt to bridge this gap, by focusing on the patterns, drivers, and policy responses to food price spikes and volatility across in Nigeria. The study was based on 16 years panel data on average monthly prices (2001:1 - 2016:12) of major food commodities across local markets in the 36 States of Nigeria, supplemented with monthly series of relevant domestic policy variables, and international prices, among other factors. Data analysis was mainly within the framework of fixed effects models. Findings suggest that food price upsurges in an average Nigeria market is more strongly related to spikes than volatility. International factors such as crude oil price, international food prices, and global beginning stock to use of coarse grains, and domestic policy variables such as real exchange rates, monetary policy rates and narrow money are strong influencers of spikes in the price of one or more food commodities in Nigeria's local markets. Higher petrol price and food production variability may substantially advance price instability in local food markets. Government policy actions at addressing volatile food prices immediately after the 2007/2008 food crises appeared to enhance food price stability. These findings call for greater attention on management of monetary policy, including the exchange rates, ensuring stable petrol price, limiting food production instability, mitigating spill-over of price upsurges from international markets and building farmers and consumer's resilience against food price changes, among others, as important pathways to address short and medium-term food price upsurges.

Most electricity markets exhibit high volatilities and occasional distinctive price spikes, which result in demand for derivative products which protect the holder against high prices. In this paper we examine a simple spot price model that is the exponential of the sum of an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck and an independent mean reverting pure jump process. We derive the moment generating function as well as various approximations to the probability density function of the logarithm of
the spot price process at maturity $T$. Hence we are able to calibrate the model to the observed forward curve and present semi-analytic formulae for premia of path-independent options as well
as approximations to call and put options on forward contracts with and without a delivery period. In order to price path-dependent options with multiple exercise rights like swing contracts a grid
method is utilised which in turn uses approximations to the conditional density of the spot process.

Using plant-level data from Chile and the U.S. we show that investment spikes are highly pro-cyclical, so much so that changes in the number of establishments undergoing investment spikes (the "extensive margin") account for the bulk of variation in aggregate investment. The number of establishments undergoing investment spikes also has independent predictive power for aggregate investment, even controlling for past investment and sales. We re-calibrate the Thomas (2002) model (that includes fixed costs of investing) so that it assigns a prominent role to extensive adjustment. The recalibrated model has different properties than the standard RBC model for some shocks.