convergence to the law of one price without trade barriers or currency fluctuations using a panel of 51 prices from 48 cities in the united states we provide an upper bound estimate of the rate of convergence to purchasing power parity we find convergence rates substantially higher than typically found in cross country data we investigate some potentially serious biases induced by i i d measurement errors in the data and find our estimates to be robust to these potential biases we also present evidence that convergence occurs faster for larger price differences finally we find that rates of convergence are slower for cities farther apart however our estimates suggest that distance alone can only account for a small portion of the much slower convergence rates across national borders

monetary union price level convergence and inflation how close is europe to the usa abstract the pattern of price dispersion across european and us cities from 1990 to 2004 is documented there is a striking decline in dispersion for traded goods prices in europe most of which took place prior to the launch of the euro dispersion in the euro area is now quite close to that of the usa this evidence provides useful facts for future work assessing the importance of various developments in europe harmonization of tax rates convergence of incomes and labor costs liberalization of trade and factor markets and increased coherence of monetary policy

endogenous market structures in international trade natura facit saltum abstract almost all of the large literature on international trade with imperfect competition assumes exogenous market structures the purpose of this paper is to develop a simple model that generates alternative market structures as nash equilibria for different parameterizations of the basic model equilibrium market structure is a function of the underlying technology familiar configurations such as a duopoly competing in exports or a single multinational producing in both markets arise as special cases small tax policy changes can produce large welfare effects as the equilibrium market structure shifts implying discontinuous jumps in prices quantities and profits

the impact of monetary union on macroeconomic integration evidence from west africa data from 19 african nations is used to investigate the hypothesis that monetary union represented in this case by the cfa franc zone augments the extent of macroeconomic integration the paper covers two key dimensions of integration the volume of bilateral trade and the magnitude of cross country business cycle correlation restricting our attention to a part of the world in which for historical reasons monetary union membership is exogenous to economic characteristics we can test whether the large single currency effects claimed by a rose apply within a sample of less developed countries

retirement effects on health in europe what are the health impacts of retirement as talk of raising retirement ages in pensions and social security schemes continues around the world it is important to know both the costs and benefits for the individual as well as the governments budgets in this paper we use the survey of health ageing and retirement in europe share dataset to address this question in a multi country setting we use country specific early and full retirement ages as instruments for retirement behavior these statutory retirement ages clearly induce retirement but are not related to an individual s health exploiting the discontinuities in retirement behavior across countries we find significant evidence that retirement has a health preserving effect on overall general health our estimates indicate that retirement leads to a 35 percent decrease in the probability of reporting to be in fair bad or very bad health and an almost one standard deviation improvement in the health index while the self reported health seems to be a temporary impact the health index indicates there are long lasting health differences

energy consumption financial development and economic growth in india new evidence from a nonlinear and asymmetric analysis this paper investigates the asymmetric relationship between energy consumption and economic growth by incorporating financial development capital and labour into a production function covering the indian economy from 1960q1 2015q4 the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach is applied to examine the asymmetric cointegration between the variables an asymmetric causality test is also employed to examine the causal association between the considered variables the results indicate cointegration between the variables in the presence of asymmetries the asymmetric causality results show that only negative shocks in energy consumption have impacts on economic growth in the same vein only negative shocks in financial development have impacts on economic growth by contrast symmetrically capital formation causes economic growth finally over the study period a neutral effect exists between the labour force and economic growth in india the implications of these results for growth policies in india are also discussed

borders and business cycles abstract we document that business cycles of u s census regions are substantially more synchronized than those of european countries data from regions within european countries confirm a european border effect within country correlations are substantially larger than cross country correlations these results continue to hold after controlling for exogenous factors such as distance and size we consider the role of four factors that have received attention in the debate about emu sectoral specialization the level of trade monetary policy and fiscal policy we find that the lower level of trade between european countries explains most of the observed border effect

financial integration gdp correlation and the endogeneity of optimum currency areas the paper analyses the relationship between trade financial integration and business cycle synchronization in the euro area the introduction of the euro has had a noticeable impact on european financial markets evidence that capital market integration exerts a positive effect on output correlation has two major implications first it corroborates the hypothesis of the endogeneity of optimum currency areas whereby after joining a monetary union countries better meet standard oca criteria second it provides european policy makers with yet another reason to pursue financial integration in the euro area and in prospective members as well

currency areas and voluntary transfers this paper discusses the relationship between the formation of a currency area and the use of voluntary fiscal transfers between countries we show that there is a trade off between the benefits of flexible exchange rates and the additional risk sharing benefits of voluntary transfers that can be sustained in a currency area we show that whether a currency area is beneficial or not will depend on the magnitude of economic parameter values in particular we show that in a simple two country model and for a plausible set of economic parameter values a currency area is optimal

trade integration and business cycle convergence is the relation robust across time and space in this paper we investigate the relationship between trade intensity and the business cycle correlation using a panel data set taken from 24 countries over the period 1959 2003 most previous studies did not account for the possibility that the business cycle correlation may be influenced by unobservable country pair specific effects our estimates using both fixed and random effects methodologies suggest that trade intensity and the business cycle correlation are positively related to one another however detailed investigation shows that this relationship exists mainly for the european countries

health as a family matter do intra household education externalities matter for maternal and child health abstract this paper is concerned with the role of education as a determinant of health care choices the central premise of the paper is that utilisation of health services is determined not solely by an individual s own education but rather by a notion of effective education which incorporates the educational attainment of other household members the paper sets out a general framework for representing intra household education externalities and proposes a number of specific hypotheses concerning the way in which the education of different household members affects health care choices these hypotheses are tested on data from mozambique focusing on maternity services child immunisations and child malnutrition we draw four major conclusions from the analysis first while maternal education seems to be the education variable of primary importance for the health service and malnutrition variables under consideration the education of other household members does have a significant and sometimes larg

do currency unions deliver more economic integration than fixed exchange rates evidence from the franc zone and the eccu in this article we develop a model to identify determinants of macroeconomic integration in the african franc zone and in dollar pegging caribbean countries including members of the east caribbean currency union these two groups of countries each comprise states using several different local currencies on the one hand the uemoa cfa franc and the cemac cfa franc both pegged to the euro on the other the eccu dollar and other national dollar pegged currencies the purpose of the analysis is to distinguish the effect of monetary union on macroeconomic integration from the effect of pegging to a common oecd currency

currency unions and international integration this paper characterizes the integration patterns of international currency unions such as the cfa franc zone we empirically explore different features of currency unions and compare them to countries with sovereign monies by examining the criteria for mundellos concept of an optimum currency area we find that members of currency unions are more integrated than countries with their own currencies for instance we find that currency union members have more trade and less volatile real exchange rates than countries with their own monies business cycles are more highly synchronized across currency union countries than across countries with sovereign monies

the response of the beijing carbon emissions allowance price bjc to macroeconomic and energy price indices in 2013 china opened pilot carbon emission trading markets in seven provinces where carbon emission allowances have now been traded for more than two years in this paper we employ a structural var model and the price of the beijing carbon emission allowance to study the dynamic relationships among the price of the carbon emission allowance economic development and the price of energy this paper s data cover the period from april 2 2014 to november 6 2015 this paper provides information that will be helpful to both investors and governmental policy makers the results show that 1 an increase of one standard deviation in the coal price leads to an initial increase of approximately 0 1 in the beijing carbon price after 2 days there is a decrease of less than 0 1 and the price gradually increases by approximately 0 1 after 30 days 2 the price of the beijing carbon emission allowance is mainly affected by its own historical price 3 the beijing carbon emission allowance price crude oil price natural gas price and economic development have positive albeit non significant correlations

detecting instability in the volatility of carbon prices this article investigates the presence of outliers in the volatility of carbon prices we compute three different measures of volatility for european union allowances based on daily data egarch model option prices implied volatility and intraday data realized volatility based on the methodology developed by zeileis et al 2003 and zeileis 2006 we detect instability in the volatility of carbon prices based on two kinds of tests retrospective tests ols recursive based cusum processes f statistics and residual sum of squares and forward looking tests by monitoring structural changes recursively or with moving estimates we show evidence of strong shifts mainly for the egarch and iv models during the time period overall we suggest that yearly compliance events and growing uncertainties in post kyoto international agreements may explain the instability in the volatility of carbon prices

testing the market integration process in the european car sector evidence from pricing to market behaviour in this study we investigate the process of the european car market integration by analysing the evolution of cross country differences in the degree of pricing to market behaviour of united kingdom exporters we estimate these country differences by exploiting statistical information for pre tax retail prices and for export unit values conclusions from both independent data sets are in general quite consistent results support the claim that in the period before the block exemption regulation 1400 2002 came fully into force international price discrimination was an important source of car price dispersion within the euro area for a more recent period we found that estimated deviations in pricing to market behaviour across destinations have become lower this convergence suggests that car market integration was progressively improved at the end of the last decade

retirement of spouses and social security reform abstract the retirement decisions of spouses may be interdependent for various reasons similarity of tastes joint assets sharing rules for income and housework or complementarity of leisure because of data limitations only a few empirical studies exist on this topic from a policy point of view the understanding of interdependent retirement decisions should become important if legislators in different european countries are forced to synchronise minimum retirement ages for men and women which are lower now for females in a number of countries we study the possibility of interdependent retirement using austrian data the findings show an asymmetry husbands react to changes in wives legal minimum retirement age wives don t react vice versa the cross effect on men s participation rates resulting from a rise in women s minimum retirement age is almost half as large as the direct effect upon the women themselves

an empirical analysis of energy cost pass through to co2 emission prices abstract we use the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag nardl model to analyze the asymmetric and nonlinear pass through effects of changes in crude oil prices natural gas prices coal prices and electricity prices on the co 2 emission allowance prices we find that i the crude oil prices have a long run negative and asymmetric effect on the co 2 allowance prices ii the decreases in the coal prices have a stronger impact on the carbon prices in the short run than the increases iii the natural gas prices and electricity prices have a symmetric effect on the carbon prices but this effect is negative for the former and positive for the latter these findings are robust when using both monthly and daily data and when considering bivariate and multivariate models

how a symmetric is the response of import demand to changes in its determinants evidence from european energy imports abstract energy imports are crucial for european countries yet little is known about determinants of their import demand we update long outdated estimates of import demand elasticities using recent data for crude and derived energy products and contribute to the debate on the asymmetry of import demand by using recent developments in econometric modelling our results have important implications for the geopolitics of energy markets in europe asymmetric income seems to be the most relevant determinant of import demand economic growth and fossil fuel consumption are correlated even in the context of the european agenda towards renewables our results suggest that european economic recovery may derail the drive for lower fossil consumption and that changes in the natural gas market may further complicate this drive especially regarding russia as the primary supplier to the eurozone

source country characteristics and the inflow of foreign direct investment into saudi arabia the paper examines the impact of source country characteristics on the inflow of fdi into saudi arabia using a gravity type model including economic distance and socio political variables a unique database listing all new investments involving foreign ownership is used to construct a panel of 33 countries in the period 1980 2005 to account for many country year observations with zero fdi the negative binomial regression the tobit regression and the heckman selection procedure are used the conclusions drawn from the analysis employing panel based techniques differ from the results obtained from pooled regression models also the determinants of fdi differ depending on whether foreign investment is measured in terms of investment expenditure or the number of individual foreign projects the heckman selection results reveal that there are a large number of factors affecting the decision to invest in saudi arabia compared with relatively few determinants of the actual size of investment traditional size and distance characteristics hold to a great extent but the relationship between fdi and bilateral trade is unclear and there is some evidence that the countries that export to saudi arabia do not invest there in terms of scope for possible spillovers there is mixed evidence on whether the investment comes from more technologically advanced economies but volume wise important investments originate from countries characterised by high income per capita

does insider trading raise market volatility this paper studies the role of insider trading in explaining cross country differences in stock market volatility it introduces a new measure of insider trading the central finding is that countries with more prevalent insider trading have more volatile stock markets even after one controls for liquidity maturity of the market and the volatility of the underlying fundamentals volatility of real output and of monetary and fiscal policies moreover the effect of insider trading is quantitatively significant when compared with the effect of economic fundamentals

the effect of a wife s retirement on her husband s mental health this article examines the effect of wives retirement on their husband s mental health in australia by exploiting the exogenous variations in women s retirement induced by the age pension qualifyi

oil shocks and their impact on energy related stocks in china abstract this paper contributes to the current literature by adopting time varying conditional correlation and asset pricing models to discover how the dynamics of international oil prices affect energy related stock returns in china after conditioning for structural instability the results show a much stronger relation following the 2008 financial crisis we argue that this reflects the fact that investors in the chinese stock market especially for energy related stocks are more sensitive to the shocks in international crude oil market

the decoupling of emerging economies theoretical and empirical puzzle with the growing importance of the emerging economies ees in the international scene a lively debate has begun on whether the national economic cycles are converging or the cycles of ees and advanced economies aes are becoming disconnected the so called hypothesis of decoupling of ees from the aes given the important practical implications that decoupling could have for example on the definition of national and international economic policies and on business strategies aimed at investment diversification and risk management the question kindles not only the interest of academics but also policymakers and practitioners are very interested in the issue the decoupling question has been long debated in different circles and from different points of view this survey aims to retrace the steps of this debate and to provide some suggestions for future empirical researches

asymmetric relationship between carbon emission trading market and stock market evidences from china abstract this paper has investigated the asymmetric relationship between carbon emission trading market and stock market in china by using the nonlinear auto regressive distributed lag nardl model based on our investigation on both of the overall and sector level of stock market we have obtained interesting and convincing empirical results that show there are significantly negative long run and short run asymmetric relationships between carbon emission trading market and overall stock market in china specifically we have noticed that while passing the effects from the former to the later the increasing of carbon emission trading price would make greater effects on the stock price than its decreasing also on the sector level carbon emission trading price is significantly related to some energy intense sectors and financial sector stock market furthermore we have surprisingly found out that there are no significant effects passing from stock index to carbon emission trading price in china neither on the overall level nor on the sector level of stock market

price level co movements within currency unions an alternative integration metric this paper analyses currency union integration by testing whether price levels in member countries possess a common stochastic trend the trace statistic test for cointegration proposed by johansen 1995 demonstrates the presence of such a trend for most unions a disaggregated analysis identifies a common stochastic trend for several though fewer than half of country pairs within a union some unions such as the eurozone have small shares of cointegrated country pairs yet the share of cointegrated country pairs is large relative to countries outside currency unions comparison to a control group country pairs where one country belongs to a given union and the other country does not indicates that the cointegration found within a currency union is a union specific trait and not a feature of the individual countries within the union these results provide an alternative metric to intraunion trade for gauging the extent of currency union integration

your retirement and my health behavior evidence on retirement externalities from a fuzzy regression discontinuity design this paper presents evidence on intra household retirement externalities by assessing the causal effect of partner s retirement on own health behaviour in europe we identify partner s retirement effects by applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity rd framework using retirement eligibility as an exogenous instrument for partner s retirement status using data from the survey of health ageing and retirement in europe share we find that while partner s retirement increases own physical activity it also increases smoking by up to 7 cigarettes a day and increases alcohol intake by 1 2 drinks per day furthermore we find that physical activity increases only for individuals that are themselves retired pointing toward compensated effects that arise due to husband s and wife s retirement being complements similarly an increase in alcohol intake is observed only if the individuals are themselves retired and an increase in smoking is only observed if the partner is a smoker suggesting mutual positive externalities and leisure complementarities

trade and business cycle synchronization in oecd countries a re examination this paper re examines the relationship between trade intensity and business cycle synchronization for 21 oecd countries in the period 1970 2003 instead of using instrumental variables we estimate a multivariate model including variables capturing specialization and similarity of economic policies we confirm that trade intensity affects synchronization but the effect is much smaller than previously reported other factors like specialization and convergence in monetary and fiscal policies have a similar impact on business cycle synchronization as trade intensity the effect of trade on synchronization is not driven by outliers however the impact of trade on synchronization is not robust across deciles c 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

foreign direct investment from developing asia some distinctive features abstract this paper finds that compared to foreign direct investment fdi from developed oecd countries fdi from east and southeast asian developing economies exhibits several distinctive features it is less sensitive to host country income and attenuated more rapidly with distance

what happens to the relationship between eu allowances prices and stock market indices in europe abstract the stock market may reflect the economic conditions of an economy and a positive economic situation is expected to improve the companies profits which makes company shares more attractive since the expected dividends to shareholders will be larger theoretically higher economic activity leads to higher energy demand and consequently higher carbon emissions which give rise to higher eu allowances eua prices therefore the stock market and eua prices seem to be connected with causality going from the stock markets to eua prices this paper formally tests for it showing that the causality effectively runs from the stock market to the european climate exchange market furthermore the paper studies the effects of the evolution of european stock markets on the eua spot prices

stages of diversification this paper studies the evolution of sectoral concentration in relation to the level of per capita income we show that various measures of sectoral concentration follow a u shaped pattern across a wide variety of data sources countries first diversify in the sense that economic activity is spread more equally across sectors but there exists relatively late in the development process a point at which they start specializing again we discuss this finding in light of existing theories of trade and growth which generally predict a monotonic relationship between income and diversification

emerging carbon constraints for corporate risk management abstract while discussions about global sustainability challenges abound the financial risks that they incur albeit important have received less attention we suggest that corporate risk assessments should include sustainability related aspects especially with relation to the natural environment and encompass the flux of critical materials within a company s value chain such a comprehensive risk assessment takes into account input as well as output related factors with this paper we focus on the flux of carbon and define carbon constraints that emerge due to the disposition of fossil fuels in the input dimension and due to direct and indirect climate change effects in the output dimension we review the literature regarding the financial consequences of carbon constraints on the macroeconomic sector and company level we conclude that a financial consequences seem to be asymmetrically distributed between and within sectors b the individual risk exposure of companies depends on the intensity of and dependency on carbon based materials and energy and c financial markets have only started to incorporate these aspects in their valuations this paper ends with recommendations on how to incorporate our results in an integrated carbon risk management framework

forecasting realized volatility of crude oil futures with equity market uncertainty this paper examines whether the equity market uncertainty emu index contains incremental information for forecasting the realized volatility of crude oil futures we use 5 min high frequency tran

the retirement consumption puzzle evidence from a regression discontinuity approach in this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in italy we use micro data on food and total non durable household spending covering the period 1993 2004 and evaluate the change in consumption that accompanies retirement by exploiting the exogenous variability in pension eligibility to correct for the endogenous nature of the retirement decision we take a regression discontinuity design approach and make the identifying assumption that consumption would be the same around the threshold for pension eligibility if individuals would not retire we check in our data that a non negligible fraction of individuals retire as soon as they become eligible and estimate at 9 8 the part of the non durable consumption drop that is associated with retirement induced by eligibility we show that such fall is not driven by liquidity problems for the less well off in the population and can be accounted for by drops in goods that are work related expenses or leisure substitutes however we also show that retirement induces a significant drop in the number of grown children living with their parents and this can account for most of the retirement consumption drop

ageing cognitive abilities and retirement we investigate the relationship between ageing cognitive abilities and retirement using the survey on health ageing and retirement in europe share a household panel that offers the possibility of comparing several european countries using nationally representative samples of the population aged 50 the human capital framework suggests that retirement may cause an increase in cognitive decline since after retirement individuals lose the market incentive to invest in cognitive repair activities our empirical results based on an instrumental variable strategy to deal with the potential endogeneity of retirement confirm this key prediction they also indicate that education plays a fundamental role in explaining heterogeneity in the level of cognitive abilities

retirement and consumption in a life cycle model consumption expenditure declines sharply at the time of retirement for many households but the majority maintain a smooth consumption path a simple life cycle model with uncertainty about the time of retirement can account for this pattern a richer version of the model is calibrated to data from the health and retirement study hrs the median change in consumption expenditure at retirement generated by the model is zero while the mean is negative matching the hrs data however the magnitude of the drop in consumption among households that experience a decline is too small in the model compared to the data

electricity consumption and economic growth evidence from turkey abstract this study investigates the causal relationship between electricity consumption and real gdp in turkey during the period of 1950 2000 both of the series were found to be a stationary process around a structural break by the zivot and andrews test thus two different methodologies have been employed to test the granger non causality the dolado lutkepohl test using the vars in levels and the standard granger causality test using the detrended data both tests have yielded a strong evidence for unidirectional causality running from the electricity consumption to the income this implies that the supply of electricity is vitally important to meet the growing electricity consumption hence to sustain the economic growth in turkey

the role of information and social interactions in retirement plan decisions evidence from a randomized experiment this paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees decisions to enroll in a tax deferred account tda retirement plan within a large university the experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benee ts information fair organized by the university by promising a monetary reward for attendance the experiment multiplied by more than e ve the attendance rate of these treated individuals relative to controls and tripled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated tda enrollment e ve and eleven months after the fair was signie cantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated however the effect on tda enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did we provide three interpretations differential treatment effects social network effects and motivational reward effects to account for these results

capital market response to emission rights returns evidence from the european power sector prior studies on the distributional effects of the european union s emission trading scheme eu ets have so far only relied on supply and demand data empirical evidence from capital markets has been missing we address this gap and measure the ets s economic consequences using the expectations of investors towards the regulatory impact on firm value employing a multifactor model we show that returns on common stock of the largest affected industry power generation are positively correlated with rising prices for emission rights this implies that the market predicts that firms are not only able to pass on their share of the regulatory burden to customers but even achieve windfall profits by overcompensating for the costs

a model of carbon price interactions with macroeconomic and energy dynamics abstract this paper develops a model of carbon pricing by considering two fundamental drivers of european union allowances economic activity and energy prices on the one hand economic activity is proxied by aggregated industrial production in the eu 27 as it provides the best performance in a preliminary forecasting exercise vs other indicators on the other hand brent natural gas and coal prices are selected as being the main carbon price drivers as highlighted by previous literature the interactions between the macroeconomic and energy spheres are captured in a markov switching var model with two states that is able to reproduce the boom bust business cycle hamilton 1989 first industrial production is found to impact positively negatively the carbon market during periods of economic expansion recession thereby confirming the existence of a link between the macroeconomy and the price of carbon second the brent price is confirmed to be the leader in price formation among energy markets bachmeier and griffin 2006 as it impacts other variables through the structure of the markov switching model taken together these results uncover new interactions between the recently created eu emissions market and the pre existing macroeconomic energy environment

retirement and home production a regression discontinuity approach existing studies show that individuals who retire replace some private consumption with home production but do not consider joint behavior of couples here we analyze the causal effect of retirement of each partner on hours of home production for both partners in a couple our identification strategy exploits the earliest age retirement laws in france enabling a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach we find that own retirement significantly increases own hours of home production and the effect is larger for men than for women moreover retirement of the female partner significantly reduces male hours of home production but not vice versa

participation and investment decisions in a retirement plan the influence of colleagues choices abstract this paper investigates whether peer effects play an important role in retirement savings decisions we use individual data from employees of a large university to study whether individual decisions to enroll in a tax deferred account plan sponsored by the university and the choice of the mutual fund vendor for people who choose to enroll are affected by the decisions of other employees in the same department to overcome the identification problems we divide the departments into sub groups along gender status age and tenure lines and we instrument the average participation of each peer group by the salary or tenure structure in this group our results suggest that peer effects may be an important determinant of savings decisions

haircuts or hysteresis sources of movements in real exchange rates abstract we empirically assess the importance of two sources of real exchange rate movements in models where ppp holds only among traded goods real exchange rate variation results from relative price movements within countries an alternative explanation relies on hysteretic price setting and nominal exchange rate changes using disaggregated price data from 11 oecd nations we find some support for the non traded goods models for example prices of haircuts in canada and the united states are unrelated in the long run we find stronger evidence to support models that emphasize sticky prices transportation costs or other impediments to frictionless trade

eu emission allowances and the stock market evidence from the electricity industry this paper constitutes to our best knowledge the first econometric analysis on stock market effects of the eu emission trading scheme eu ets our results suggest that eu emission allowance eua price developments matter to the stock performance of electricity firms eua price changes and stock returns of the most important european electricity corporations are shown to be positively related this effect does not work asymmetrically so that stock markets do not seem to react differently to eua appreciations in comparison to depreciations the carbon market effect is shown to be both time and country specific it is particularly strong for the period of eua market shock in early 2006 and differs with respect to the countries where the electricity corporations analysed are headquartered stock market reactions to eua volatility could not be shown

stock market synchronization and monetary integration abstract this paper focuses on the relationship between stock market comovements and monetary integration a panel specification is used to explain bilateral stock market return correlations between fifteen developed economies over the period 1975 2006 time fixed effects are included to capture global shocks and we also examine the role of bilateral trade linkages and international financial integration monetary integration leads to stronger stock market synchronization both through the elimination of exchange rate volatility and through the common monetary policy and the convergence of inflation expectations trade and financial integration also contribute to higher stock market return comovements

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

stock prices of clean energy firms oil and carbon markets a vector autoregressive analysis recent discussions of energy security and climate change have attracted significant attention to clean energy we hypothesize that rising prices of conventional energy and or placement of a price on carbon emissions would encourage investments in clean energy firms the data from three clean energy indices show that oil prices and technology stock prices separately affect the stock prices of clean energy firms however the data fail to demonstrate a significant relationship between carbon prices and the stock prices of the firms

on the distribution of exchange rate regime treatment effects on international trade abstract this paper provides evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on trade for six different types of exchange rate regime transitions utilizing data on 218 643 country pair year observations all together previous research mainly focused on the currency union effect on trade and widely assumed that country pairs with identical observable characteristics receive the same effect we test the hypothesis of a homogeneous treatment effect empirically and find substantive statistical support for the presence of effect heterogeneity moreover we characterize the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity among observationally equivalent country pairs by way of a random coefficients model we estimate selected features of the empirical distributions of the treatment effects for each of the six different types of exchange rate regime transitions under two different sets of assumptions about the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity our findings suggest that the immediate effects on trade from switching to an exchange rate regime different from the one in the outset have wide waists and exhibit large positive extreme values we estimate the probability of two countries to experience an immediate positive effect on the growth of bilateral trade due to the adoption of any new exchange rate regime tighter or not to be approximately one half

literacy and intrahousehold externalities abstract the size of the intrahousehold externality created when a literate household member provides literacy services to illiterate members is estimated in this paper using a model of children s height for age in papua new guinea this externality appears to be large these results support the use of a new measure of literacy developed by basu and foster 1998 to take account of the gains when illiterates live in households where at least one person is literate regional rankings change when the new measure of literacy is used suggesting that policies guided by the usual measure of adult literacy may overlook an important pathway for human development

asymmetric impact of oil price on islamic sectoral stocks abstract this paper extends the literature concerning non linearity in oil stock relationships by putting forward a new paradigm of sectoral and islamic elements we explore the asymmetric impact of oil price on islamic stocks from a sectoral perspective using non linear autoregressive distributed lag cointegration methodology the main advantage of this methodology relies on its ability to simultaneously capture the short and long run asymmetries through both positive and negative oil price shocks our results show weak linkages between oil price changes and the islamic composite index however the nature and sensitivity of the reaction of stock prices to oil price shocks vary considerably across different sectors in the longer horizon the relationships between oil price and many islamic sectoral stocks tend to follow a nonlinear pattern furthermore the behavior of the real economic sectors indices reflects the performance of the composite index that is oil price resistant during the turbulent period after 2008 the response of the sectoral indices to oil price movements witnessed notable changes where the sectoral gains from oil price drop that have been observed during the period of study have been found to diminish after 2008 our finding is in line with the argument that the islamic composite index is grounded more on and within the real sectors these findings are robust when considering different oil proxies and different data time frequencies

risk sharing and industrial specialization regional and international evidence the authors provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production to the best of their knowledge this well established and important theoretical proposition has not been tested before the empirical procedure is summarized as follows first the authors construct a measure of specialization in production and calculate an index of specialization for each of the european community ec and non ec oecd countries u s states canadian provinces japanese prefectures latin american countries and regions of italy spain and the united kingdom then they estimate the degree of capital market integration a measure of risk sharing within each of these groups of regions the ec countries the non ec oecd countries the united states canada japan italy spain and the united kingdom and rely on another author s estimate for latin america finally they perform a regression of the specialization index on the degree of risk sharing controlling for relevant economic variables they find a positive and significant relation between the degree of specialization of individual members of a group of countries provinces states or prefectures and the amount of risk that is shared within the group the authors perform regressions using variables such as shareholder rights and the size of the financial sector relative to gdp as instruments for the amount of inter regional risk sharing these regressions confirm that risk sharing facilitated by a favorable legal environment and a developed financial system is a direct causal determinant of industrial specialization this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the myth of decoupling the decoupling hypothesis is the idea that business cycles in emerging market economies have become more independent from business cycles in advanced economies in recent years decoupling essentially amounts to a structural break in the degree of business cycle interdependence between the two groups of economies and it can be tested as such we develop an innovative measure of business cycle interdependence based on the euclidean distance available at the annual frequency which allows for a proper test for a structural break in a graphical setup we also make use of a standard econometric test both approaches point to the same conclusion there has been no decoupling in recent years if anything the degree of business cycle interdependence has become stronger

disaggregated trade and disaggregated currency unions a ranking of common currency effects andrew rose has long argued that a common currency has a large effect on increasing trade recently rose has called into question the reliability of this conclusion as new techniques have emerged for estimating gravity equations this article uses the sector specific gravity model developed by anderson and yotov 2010a to investigate if disaggregated trade can provide a reliable estimate of a common currency s effect disaggregating trade alone is insufficient to obtain a reliable estimate of a currency union regardless of econometric technique when the effect of a common currency on trade is uniform across all unions disaggregating the universe of currency unions with individual effects provides a reliable ranking of currency unions independent of estimation method by the effect that each union s currency has on increasing trade these rankings differ across sectors

asymmetric impacts of oil price uncertainty on chinese stock returns under different market conditions evidence from oil volatility index abstract the crude oil volatility index ovx is a direct and more accurate measure of oil price uncertainty this paper uses this kind of implied volatility index of oil prices to investigate the impacts of oil price uncertainty on the aggregate and sectoral stock returns in china this issue is resolved by using a quantile regression which can provide a more detailed examination under different market conditions meanwhile the asymmetric effects of uncertainty shocks are also examined by using the positive and negative changes of the ovx furthermore we assess whether the reform of march 27 2013 affected the ovx stock nexus since this reform was a major step to relax the control of domestic oil prices in china our results reveal that ovx changes mainly show significantly negative effects on the aggregate and sectoral stock returns in the bearish market in particular these effects depend largely on the positive shocks of the ovx rather than the negative shocks of the ovx moreover the reform of march 27 2013 decreased the impacts of the positive ovx shocks on chinese stock returns

energy prices and co2 emission allowance prices a quantile regression approach we use a quantile regression framework to investigate the impact of changes in crude oil prices natural gas prices coal prices and electricity prices on the distribution of the co2 emission allowance prices in the united states we find that i an increase in the crude oil price generates a substantial drop in the carbon prices when the latter is very high ii changes in the natural gas prices have a negative effect on the carbon prices when they are very low but have a positive effect when they are quite high iii the impact of the changes in the electricity prices on the carbon prices can be positive in the right tail of the distribution and iv the coal prices exert a negative effect on the carbon prices

business cycle synchronization in the emu this article asks whether the business cycles of the eu countries have become more or less synchronized after the introduction of the euro our findings show that all countries in our eu sample are better synchronized with the emu wide economy in the post emu period than they were before the euro we also show that this increase in synchronization is present in all components of aggregate demand as well as two supply side variables but it is more pronounced in the trade components imports and particularly exports it is also shown that the increase in trade within the emu area is at least partly responsible for the increase in cyclical synchronization