on the impacts of oil price fluctuations on european equity markets volatility spillover and hedging effectiveness the objective of this paper is to investigate the volatility spillovers between oil and stock markets in europe as not all industries are expected to be equally affected by oil price changes we conduct our study at both the aggregate as well as sector levels empirically we make use of a recently developed var garch approach which allows for transmissions in volatilities in addition we analyze the optimal weights and hedge ratios for oil stock portfolio holdings based on our results on the whole our findings show significant volatility spillovers between oil price and sector stock returns and suggest that a better understanding of those links is crucial for portfolio management in the presence of oil price risk

oil price volatility and stock price fluctuations in an emerging market evidence from south korea abstract how important are oil price fluctuations and oil price volatility on equity market performance what are the policy implications if volatility turns out to be significant we assess this issue in an economics finance nexus for korea using a vec model including interest rates economic activity real stock returns real oil prices and oil price volatility our main aim is to capture the effects of crude oil prices on the korean economy thoroughly covering the period of the asian financial crisis of 1997 which heavily affected the country and the oil price hikes in the early 1990s after the gulf war south korea was the country most hit by the financial crisis together with indonesia and thailand results indicate the dominance of oil price volatility on real stock returns and emphasize how this has increased over time oil price volatility can have profound effect on the time horizon of investment and firms need adjust their risk management procedures accordingly this increase in dependency has been found in other net oil importing emerging equity markets we test the relationship between oil price movements and economic activity by using modern time series techniques in a cointegrating framework we expand the standard error correction model by examining the dynamics of out of sample causality through the generalized variance decomposition and impulse response function techniques the evidence from persistence profiles also gives important guidelines based on how fast the entire system adjusts back to equilibrium in addition we find the cointegrating relationship to be stable and find that the linear error correction model to be more favorable than an asymmetric 2 period markov switching model

dynamic political choice in macroeconomics we analyze positive theories of redistribution social insurance and public good provision in a dynamic macroeconomic framework political outcomes are determined via repeated voting and driven by a conflict of interests between agents voters and politicians rationally forecast the impact of current political choices on future political and economic outcomes the theory is consistent with large differences in the size of governments across societies these need not rely on intrinsic differences in preferences or technology but may be driven by self fulfilling

answering the skeptics yes standard volatility models do provide accurate forecasts a voluminous literature has emerged for modeling the temporal dependencies in financial market volatility using arch and stochastic volatility models while most of these studies have documented highly significant in sample parameter estimates and pronounced intertemporal volatility persistence traditional ex post forecast evaluation criteria suggest that the models provide seemingly poor volatility forecasts contrary to this contention we show that volatility models produce strikingly accurate interdaily forecasts for the latent volatility factor that would be of interest in most financial applications new methods for improved ex post interdaily volatility measurements based on high frequency intradaily data are also discussed

a positive theory of social security based on reputation we construct a general equilibrium model in which a pay as you go social security system can be adopted and sustained as a political and economic equilibrium we alalyze the welfare implictions of this system and compare general equilibrium welfare measure to the commonly used notion of actuarial fairness

co movement of international crude oil price and indian stock market evidences from nonlinear cointegration tests this article explores nonlinear cointegration between international crude oil price and indian stock market in a multivariate framework for the period january 2 2003 to july 29 2011 by threshold cointegration tests which determine the structural breaks endogenously the tests reject any long run equilibrium relationship among the variables for the entire data span in order to get better insight threshold cointegration tests have been applied on three sub phases prior phase i and post phase iii to most volatile phase phase ii spanning from july 2 2007 to dec 29 2008 the tests suggest existence of cointegration in phase iii only toda yamamoto version of granger causality tests reveals that movements of international crude oil price have impact on indian stock market in phases ii and iii with no feedback effect the findings also suggest that global crude oil price is exogenously determined

asymmetric effects of oil price uncertainty on corporate investment abstract using a comprehensive data set of a large panel of us firms over 1984 2017 we show that the negative effect of crude oil price return uncertainty on investments is asymmetric in particular we show that investment is more significantly reduced following the volatility of positive oil price changes than that of negative changes and this asymmetric effect is more pronounced in small firms in addition we find that the asymmetric effect is stronger in the crude oil and gas producing companies where the effect of the volatility of negative oil price changes is greater than that of positive oil price changes we also find that the impact of positive or negative oil price change uncertainty on investments substantially differs across different industries the results are quite robust to the way in which we measure the investment and oil price uncertainty and to alternative regression methods

a time varying copula approach to oil and stock market dependence the case of transition economies abstract we employ the time varying copula approach to investigate the conditional dependence between the brent crude oil price and stock markets in the central and eastern european cee transition economies our results show evidence of a positive dependence between the oil and the stock markets of the six cee countries which is indicative of a contagion between those markets regardless of the changes in the oil price or the cee stock index moreover the dependence patterns in both the center and left tails of the return distributions change over time particularly during the heart of the financial crisis and are best described by the survival gumbel copulas the empirical evidence also suggests that the lower tail dependence is much stronger than that of the upper tail highlighting the importance of contagion during severe contractionary business cycles among the sample markets poland is shown to be particularly sensitive in this regard while hungary and slovenia are the least sensitive

asymmetric volatility spillovers between crude oil and international financial markets abstract in this paper we examine asymmetric volatility spillovers between oil and international stock markets in a vector autoregression framework using a directed acyclic graph dag technique we provide evidence that bad total volatility spillovers dominate the system and change over time suggesting that a pessimistic mood and uninformed traders who tend to increase volatility dominate in markets positive spillovers of oil markets dominated from 2006 to mid 2009 but reversed after mid 2009 moreover the spillovers from good volatilities in oil markets to bad volatilities in global stock markets were significantly positive during the economic recovery period the recent important economic and political events have influenced asymmetries in volatility spillovers

consumer demand and the life cycle allocation of household expenditures the purpose of this paper is to estimate the parameters of household preferences that determine the allocation of goods within the period and over the life cycle using micro data in doing so the authors are able to identify important effects of demographics labor market status and other household characteristics on the intertemporal allocation of expenditure they test the validity of the life cycle model using excess sensitivity tests and find that controlling for demographics and labor market status variables can largely explain the excess sensitivity of consumption to anticipated changes in income

when prices hardly matter incomplete insurance contracts and markets for repair goods abstract this paper looks at markets characterized by the fact that the demand side is insured in these markets a consumer purchases a good to compensate consequences of unfavorable events such as an accident or an illness insurance policies in most lines of insurance base indemnity on the insured s actual expenses i e the insured would be partially or completely reimbursed when purchasing certain goods in this setting we discuss the interaction between insurance and repair markets by focusing on one hand upon the development of prices and the structure of markets with insured consumers and on the other hand the resulting backlash on optimal insurance contracting we show that even in the absence of ex post moral hazard the extension of insurance coverage will lead to an increase in prices as well as to a socially undesirable increase in the number of repair service suppliers if repair markets are imperfect

information and incentives the agency information problem this paper considers the use of imperfect information for risk sharing and incentive purposes when perfect observation of actions and outcomes is impossible making complete contracting infeasible the incentive insurance problem is defined to consist of two parts the choice of an information system and the design of a sharing rule based on the information system a generalized agency model is formulated to analyse this problem the agency models of ross 1973a b wilson 1968 stiglitz 1974 mirrlees 1976 harris and raviv 1979 holmstrom 1979 a o appear as special cases of the generalized model the analysis focuses on the value of information in the agency information problem the set of information systems which are valuable i e improve risk sharing and incentives in a pareto sense is characterized a problem independent ranking of information systems for the agency information problem is then characterized under the assumption that the agent s preferences are additive in money and actions the ranking may be viewed as a generalization of blackwell s ranking of information systems for decision problems to this particular game when the agent s risk preferences depend on his choice of action on the other hand it is shown that the blackwell ranking may be invalid randomized incentive schemes are shown to be efficient when the incentive effect of risk is positive and sufficiently large relative to the absolute risk aversion of the partners

period specific volatility spillover based connectedness between oil and other commodity prices and their portfolio implications abstract this paper analyses the changing impact of oil price shocks on a bouquet of metal and agro prices and their implications for investment decisions during different oil price regimes separated by structural breaks endogenously identifying the structural breaks we use network analysis to decipher the nature and extent of such shock transfer across different sub periods we suggest optimal portfolios based on conditional variance estimates to hedge oil shocks during each period this is the first study to analyse the portfolio decisions during specific oil price regimes the results are of significant interest to investors and policy makers

risk taking global diversification and growth this paper develops a continuous time stochastic model in which international risk sharing can yield substantial welfare gains through its effect on expected consumption growth the mechanism linking global diversification to growth is an attendant world portfolio shift from safe low yield capital to riskier high yield capital the presence of these two types of capital captures the idea that growth depends on the availability of an ever increasing array of specialized hence inherently risky production inputs calibration exercises using consumption and stock market data imply that most countries reap large steady state welfare gains from global financial integration copyright 1994 by american economic association

volatility spillovers between oil prices and stock sector returns implications for portfolio management abstract in this article we take a recent generalized var garch approach to examine the extent of volatility transmission between oil and stock markets in europe and the united states at the sector level the empirical model is advantageous in that it typically allows simultaneous shock transmission in the conditional returns and volatilities insofar as volatility transmission across oil and stock sector markets is a crucial element for portfolio designs and risk management we also analyze the optimal weights and hedge ratios for oil stock portfolio holdings with respect to the results our findings point to the existence of significant volatility spillover between oil and sector stock returns however the spillover is usually unidirectional from oil markets to stock markets in europe but bidirectional in the united states our back testing procedures finally suggest that taking the cross market volatility spillovers estimated from the var garch models often leads to diversification benefits and hedging effectiveness better than those of commonly used multivariate volatility models such as the ccc garch of bollerslev 1990 the diagonal bekk garch of engle and kroner 1995 and the dcc garch of engle 2002

asymmetric volatility spillovers between oil and stock markets evidence from china and the united states abstract the relationship between oil and stock markets is a hot topic but little research has focused on the time varying asymmetric volatility spillover in a quantitative manner in this study we use a new spillover directional measure and asymmetric spillover measures to investigate the dynamic asymmetric volatility spillover between oil and stock markets during the period of 2007 to 2016 using the intra day data of wti future prices the sp the results also show strong evidence of asymmetries in volatility shocks between the oil and stock markets due to bad volatility

the political intergenerational welfare state abstract using a three period overlapping generations economy framework we characterize an intergenerational welfare state with endogenous education and pension under voting we show that although politically establishing pay as you go payg social security in isolation in a dynamically efficient economy will always reduce the capital investment and therefore the social welfare as expected in contrast politically implementing education pension policy package instead can improve both human and physical capital accumulation and social welfare over laissez faire however for this the political influence of the old has to be small thus limiting the size of the payg social security program

the aging population and the size of the welfare state data for the united states and countries in western europe indicate a negative correlation between the dependency ratio and labor tax rates and the generosity of social transfers after other factors that influence the size of the welfare state are controlled for this occurs despite the increased political clout of the dependent population implied by the aging of the population this paper develops an overlapping generations model of intra and intergenerational transfers including old age social security and human capital formation that addresses this seeming puzzle we show that with democratic voting an increase in the dependency ratio can lead to lower taxes or less generous social transfers

uncertainty of governmental relief and the crowding out of flood insurance this paper discusses the problem of crowding out of insurance by co existing governmental relief programs the so called charity hazard in the context of different institutional schemes of governmental disaster relief in austria and germany we test empirically whether an assured partial relief scheme as in austria drives a stronger crowding out of private insurance than a scheme promising full relief which is subject to ad hoc political decision making as in germany our general finding is that the institutional design of governmental relief programs significantly affects the demand for private natural hazard insurance

a quantitative theory of social security without commitment abstract this paper investigates the determination of social security within a general equilibrium overlapping generations model where agents live for many periods and replacement rates are determined through voting in each period by forward looking agents the distinctive feature is the study of markov equilibrium policy outcomes which do not rest on a commitment mechanism versions of the model are calibrated to the us economic policy and demographic conditions even in the absence of commitment the policy preferences of tax paying working age voters sustain a positive level of retirement benefits this follows because the current choices about social security will have at the time when the current voters will retire a positive impact on the political support for social security and on the returns to savings on the other hand the projected decline in the u s population growth rate causes the replacement rate and the tax rate to decline this quantitative response without commitment differs from that in the case when policies are committed at time zero

have commodities become a financial asset evidence from ten years of financialization the financialization of commodity markets over the last decade has changed the behavior of commodity prices in fundamental ways in this paper we uncover the gradual transformation of commodities from a physical to a financial asset although economic demand and supply factors continue to play an important role recent indicators associated with financialization have emerged since 2008 we show that financial variables have become the main driving factors explaining the variation in commodity returns and volatility today our findings have important implications for portfolio analysis and for the effectiveness of hedging in commodity markets

growth effects of flat rate taxes recent estimates of the potential growth effects of tax reform vary wildly ranging from zero to eight percentage points using an endogenous growth model we assess which model features and parameter values are important for determining the quantitative impact of tax reform we find that the critical parameters are factor shares depreciation rates the elasticity of intertemporal substitution and the elasticity of labor supply the elasticities of substitution in production on the other hand are relatively unimportant the quantitative estimates in several recent papers are compared with each other and with some of the evidence from u s experience we find that robert lucas s conclusion that tax reform would have little or no effect on the u s growth rate is theoretically robust and consistent with the evidence

the wealth effects of premium subsidies on moral hazard in insurance markets abstract insurance premium subsidies are present in many insurance markets the swiss government for example paid out chf 4 26 billion or 0 72 of the swiss gdp for health insurance premium subsidies in 2011 analyses of premium subsidies have often highlighted that the increased insurance demand due to premium subsidies increases the effects of moral hazard in the market other consequences of premium subsidies however have mostly been neglected by the literature we show in our theoretical model that the wealth effects of premium subsidies decrease the sensitivity of the insured towards the monetary consequences of losses this leads to less prevention efforts by the insured and thus increases moral hazard in the market the effect is preserved if the subsidy is financed through proportional taxation using two alternative models we show that providing state dependent subsidies can either increase or reverse this effect depending on which state subsidies are paid we argue that whether demand effects or wealth effects of premium subsidies will dominate the insured s behavior depends on the market structure

assessing the impact of oil returns on emerging stock markets a panel data approach for ten central and eastern european countries abstract this paper uses an international multi factor model in order to investigate the relationship between oil price risk and stock market returns for the emerging capital markets of the central and eastern european countries ceecs a panel data approach is being employed for the period covering 22 october 1999 until 23 august 2007 the oil price beta is found to be negative and statistically significant suggesting that the oil price is indeed an important factor in determining stock returns no statistically significant non linear dependency is found between market risk and emerging market stock returns or between oil price risk and returns observation of conditional models shows positive reaction of emerging stock market returns to upward movements of market returns the reaction of the stock returns to upward and downward movements of the oil market is also negative but more significant when oil prices are low

the cyclical and secular behaviour of the labour input comparing efficiency units and hours worked summary a monthly labour input series designed to correct for the fact that all hours worked are not of the same quality is constructed and its properties compared with unadjusted hours worked this efficiency units series is constructed from bls data on hours worked and earnings by age and sex the cyclical fluctuations displayed by the efficiency units series are smaller on average than those displayed by hours worked although the difference is not large however the secular behaviour of the series is quite different hours worked per capita displays a significant positive trend while efficiency units per capita does not

politico economic equilibrium and economic growth abstract we propose a notion of dynamic politico economic equilibrium which builds on two key assumptions policies are determined sequentially and agents are fully rational in their roles as both consumers and voters we examine a simple model of endogenous growth and infinitely lived agents where taxes on income are endogenous and where growth critically depends on the initial distribution of asset holdings we relate our equilibrium definition and results to existing literature on time consistency and on political economy and growth we show that our equilibria are time consistent and we argue that the choice of equilibrium concept might have important quantitative implications

time consistent optimal fiscal policy this article studies the properties of optimal fiscal policy in a stochastic growth model when the government cannot commit itself beyond the next period s capital income tax rate we find that the results contrast markedly with those under full commitment first capital income tax rates are very high 65 on average versus close to zero on average under full commitment second labor income taxes are rather low on average about 12 versus a value of around 31 under full commitment finally labor income taxes are quite volatile whereas under full commitment their standard deviation is essentially zero

a lagrange multiplier test for causality in variance we adapt the lagrange multiplier lm principle to test for noncausality in variance of financial returns the new test is compared with a portmanteau statistic cheung y w ng l k 1996 a causality in variance test and its application to financial market prices journal of econometrics 72 33 48 a monte carlo study reveals superior power of the lm test

time varying volatility spillover between chinese fuel oil and stock index futures markets based on a dcc garch model with a semi nonparametric approach abstract this paper reveals some new evidence on the volatility spillover between fuel oil and stock index futures markets in china by considering its time variant feature time varying effect is specified by the legendre polynomials in a dcc garch model moreover the semi nonparametric snp approach accounting for marginal excess kurtosis and asymmetry is applied we find different time evolving patterns of volatility spillover across multiple periods due to the structural breaks the direction of mean volatility spillover is found to be bilateral moreover the strength of mean volatility spillover shows that the effect from stock index to fuel oil futures is much stronger than the other way around this implies that the stock index futures market plays a leading role in information processing these findings have important implications for the fuel oil stakeholders as well as risk management

oil and stock market volatility a multivariate stochastic volatility perspective abstract this paper models the volatility of stock and oil futures markets using the multivariate stochastic volatility structure in an attempt to extract information intertwined in both markets for risk prediction it offers four major findings first the stock and oil futures prices are inter related their correlation follows a time varying dynamic process and tends to increase when the markets are more volatile second conditioned on the past information the volatility in each market is very persistent i e it varies in a predictable manner third there is inter market dependence in volatility innovations that hit either market can affect the volatility in the other market in other words conditioned on the persistence and the past volatility in their respective markets the past volatility of the stock oil futures market also has predictive power over the future volatility of the oil futures stock market finally the model produces more accurate value at risk estimates than other benchmarks commonly used in the financial industry

the directional volatility connectedness between crude oil and equity markets new evidence from implied volatility indexes in this paper we use a set of newly introduced implied volatility indexes to investigate the directional connectedness between oil and equities in eleven major stock exchanges around the globe from 2008 to 2015 the inference on the oil equity implied volatility relationships depends on diebold and yilmaz 2012 2014 2015 who proposed a set of directional measures that enable the dynamic and directional characterization of the relationships among financial variables we find uniform results across the sample countries indicating that the connectedness between oil and equity is established by the bi directional information spillovers between the two markets however we find that the bulk of association is largely dominated by the transmissions from the oil market to equity markets and not the other way around the pattern of transmissions is varying over the sample period however most of the linkages between oil and equities are established from the mid of 2009 to the mid of 2012 which is a period that witnessed the start of global recovery

modeling oil price us stock nexus a varma bekk agarch approach abstract this study adds to the existing literature on oil price us stock nexus in three ways first it employs the varma agarch model developed by mcaleer et al 2009 within the context of bekk framework using west texas intermediate wti and brent as proxies for oil market and s p stocks as a proxy for us stock market secondly it modifies the model to include endogenously determined structural break using the general structure for analyzing breaks with unit roots in perron 2006 third it uses the adopted model to compute optimal portfolio weight and hedge ratios between oil price and us stocks using different sample data based on the break date on average our empirical evidence suggests a significant positive return spillover from us stock market to oil market and bi directional shock spillovers between the two markets in addition there is significant own asymmetric shock effect in both markets while volatility spillover from oil market to stock market became pronounced after the break which coincides with the period of global economic slowdown similarly the results of portfolio management differ across the sample data more importantly we find that ignoring structural break when it exists may exaggerate hedging effectiveness

effective tax rates in macroeconomics cross country estimates of tax rates on factor incomes and consumption abstract this paper proposes a method for computing tax rates using national accounts and revenue statistics using this method we construct time series of tax rates for large industrial countries the method identifies the revenue raised by different taxes at the general government level and defines aggregate measures of the corresponding tax bases this method yields estimates of effective tax rates on factor incomes and consumption consistent with the tax distortions faced by a representative agent in a general equilibrium framework these tax rates compare favorably with existing estimates of marginal tax rates and highlight important international differences in tax policy

the dynamic dependence of fossil energy investor sentiment and renewable energy stock markets abstract this study investigates the dynamic directional information spillover of return and volatility between the fossil energy market investor sentiment towards renewable energy and the renewable energy stock market using the connectedness network approach empirical results show that the spillover effects of the volatility system are generally stronger than that of the return system which suggest that risk transmission among the markets is more obvious in both systems the impact of the fossil energy market especially crude oil on the renewable energy stock market is greater than the impact of investor sentiment on the renewable energy stock market this finding shows that the renewable energy stock market is closely related to the fossil energy market furthermore the rolling window approach is adopted to examine the time varying information spillover among them the dynamic findings suggest that investor sentiment towards renewable energy can explain the return and volatility of renewable energy stock to a certain degree

moral hazard and optimal commodity taxation abstract this paper demonstrates that in an economy with moral hazard and more than one commodity competitive equilibrium is not constrained efficient to correct the market failure differential commodity taxation is necessary a general optimal tax formula is derived and special cases of is discussed

modeling volatility and correlations between emerging market stock prices and the prices of copper oil and wheat abstract increased financial integration between countries and the financialization of commodity markets are providing investors with new ways to diversify their investment portfolios this paper uses varma agarch and dcc agarch models to model volatilities and conditional correlations between emerging market stock prices copper prices oil prices and wheat prices the dynamic conditional correlation model is found to fit the data the best and used to generate dynamic conditional correlations hedge ratios and optimal portfolio weights emerging market stock prices and oil prices display leverage effects where negative residuals tend to increase the variance conditional volatility more than positive ones correlations between these assets increased considerably after 2008 and have yet to return to their pre 2008 values on average oil provides the cheapest hedge for emerging market stock prices while copper is the most expensive but given the variability in the hedge ratios one should probably not put too much emphasis on average hedge ratios

a welfare analysis of social security in a dynastic framework in this article we study the welfare effects of unfunded social security in a general equilibrium model populated with overlapping generations of altruistic individuals that differ in lifetime expectancy and earnings ability contrary to previous research our results indicate that steady state welfare increases with social security for most households although by very different amounts this result is mainly due to two factors first the presence of two sided altruism significantly mitigates the crowding out effect of unfunded social security second ability shocks and uncertain lifetimes generate significant heterogeneity among households to yield different induced preferences for social security

estimating the moral hazard effect of supplemental medical insurance in the demand for prescription drugs by the elderly almost all persons over the age of 65 are insured under the medicare program for inpatient drug consumption this national insurance plan does not however generally cover the purchase of outpatient prescription drugs rx in 1992 more than onethird of all outpatient drug expenditures in the united states were incurred by medicare enrollees yet approximately 50 percent of the elderly did not have any coverage for this type of treatment daniel waldo 1994 in response to this and other gaps in medicare coverage private firms have offered insurance instruments specifically designed to fill such voids commonly known as medigap policies in addition to this form of financial protection contingent upon state of residency and economic status elderly persons may qualify and obtain coverage for rx through medicaid or a state sponsored drug program however even with these incomeand wealth sensitive options many relatively poor elderly are faced with significant outof pocket drug expenditures coverage is concentrated among those elderly with income over 200 percent of poverty and those below the poverty line stephen long 1994 the most vulnerable elderly seem to be protected from the financial hardship of excessive rx expenses through medicaid coverage but private supplemental insurance is potentially too expensive for seniors near the poverty line to alleviate this burden 11 states currently offer some form of rx insurance that is targeted at those elderly or disabled persons who are relatively poor but do not qualify for medicaid at the national level policymakers and interest groups have advocated adding coverage to the medicare program to assess such programmatic changes an accurate forecast of the potential change in rx usage is needed in this paper we use a 1990 sample of medicare enrolled pennsylvanians who may have private medigap insurance or coverage under the state s rx program to estimate the amount by which the rx demand of the average individual would change in the presence of insurance coverage ceteris paribus such a residual increase in the consumption of a medical commodity has been labeled the moralhazard effect of health insurance the estimation of this effect requires a nonstandard regression technique because insurance coverage for rx and those types of treatments that are complementary or substitutable for prescriptions may be endogenously determined those persons with a higher demand for drugs are more likely to demand supplemental insurance for rx coulson and terza department of economics pennsylvania state university university park pa 16802 neslusan division of economic research at the social security administration 4301 connecticut avenue n w washington dc 20008 stuart department of health policy and administration pennsylvania state university university park pa 16802 funding for survey design and implementation used in this research was supported by grants from the pew charitable trusts and the health care financing administration grant no 88 01439 001 the views expressed herein are not necessarily endorsed by either these agencies or the social security administration 1the now repealed medicare catastrophic coverage act of 1988 as well as many of the recent healthcare reform proposals would have provided for outpatient rx coverage for the elderly 122

relationships between oil price shocks and stock market an empirical analysis from china this paper investigates the interactive relationships between oil price shocks and chinese stock market using multivariate vector auto regression oil price shocks do not show statistically significant impact on the real stock returns of most chinese stock market indices except for manufacturing index and some oil companies some important oil price shocks depress oil company stock prices increase in oil volatility may increase the speculations in mining index and petrochemicals index which raise their stock returns both the world oil price shocks and china oil price shocks can explain much more than interest rates for manufacturing index

oil price shocks and stock market returns evidence for some european countries abstract in this paper we examine the impact of oil price shocks on stock returns in 12 oil importing european economies using vector autoregressive var and vector error correction models vecm for the period 1973 02 2011 12 we propose an alternative oil price shock specification that takes into account both world oil production and world oil prices in order to disentangle oil supply and oil demand shocks we find that the response of the european real stock returns to an oil price shock may differ greatly depending on the underlying causes of the oil price change the results suggest the existence of a negative and significant impact of oil price changes on most european stock market returns furthermore we find that stock market returns are mostly driven by oil supply shocks

risk spillover of international crude oil to china s firms evidence from granger causality across quantile abstract this paper investigates the extreme risk spillover of international crude oil to stock returns for 529 firms listed on the a share market of the shanghai stock exchange we apply a kernel based nonparametric method to test quantile on quantile granger causality from crude oil to firm returns from the perspective of firm level analysis the findings are outlined as follows first our empirical results provide strong evidence to suggest the asymmetry in the linkage of extreme movements from crude oil to firm returns that is the case of positive risk spillovers are more severe than the case of negative risk spillovers in particular the down to down risk spillover is the most serious case this phenomenon unravels the strong driving force of economic cycles second risk transmission from oil price shocks to firm returns depends on the firm s industry features in addition to the usual focus on inter industry difference we also note the within industry heterogeneity third we confirm that china s refined oil pricing reform of march 27 2013 has had intensifying effects on the negative spillovers from oil prices to firms for investors we emphasize not only the awareness of the predictive power between extreme risks from international crude oil to china s firms but also the existence of heterogeneity in these predictive abilities across firms

public education and pensions in democracy a political economy theory a dynamic political economy theory of scal policy is presented to explain the simultaneous existence of public education and pensions in modern democracies the driving force of the model is the intergenerational conict over the allocation of the public budget successive generations of voters choose scal policies through repeated elections the political power of elderly voters creates the motive for adults to support public investment in the human capital of future generations since it expands future pension possibilities we characterize the markov perfect equilibrium of the voting game in a small open economy the equilibrium reproduces salient features of intergenerational

is china s natural gas market globally connected abstract the rise of the shale gas industry and the need for clean low carbon energy transformation in china has meant that the relationship between domestic and foreign natural gas markets has become closer therefore identifying the changing relationships between the major global natural gas markets and china s natural gas market has important practical value for the current chinese domestic natural gas pricing system this paper used the dcc garch nardl ardl ecm as the analytical framework to study these relationships from which it was found that there was no unified global natural gas market and that china s natural gas market was not yet aligned with this market it was shown that there was no significant asymmetry in the impact of international gas prices on china s gas prices as no flexible adjustment measures were found in china s imported natural gas pricing mechanism moreover while international natural gas prices were found to have a significant impact on china s natural gas prices over the long term there were obvious regional differences over the short term accordingly new pricing policies should be designed to promote market oriented natural gas pricing reforms in acknowledging features such as asymmetry the difference between imported gas sources and the periodicity of price adjustment

the structure of interdependence in international stock markets abstract this study investigates the dynamic structure of nine major stock markets using an error correction model and directed acyclic graphs dag the dag representation provides a structure of causality among these markets in contemporaneous time building on this contemporaneous structure and the estimated error correction model innovation accounting techniques are applied the results show that the japanese market is among the most highly exogenous and the canadian and french markets among the least exogenous in our nine market study the us market is highly influenced by its own historical innovations but it is also influenced by market innovations from the uk switzerland hong kong france and germany the us market is the only market that has a consistently strong impact on price movements in other major stock markets in the longer run

the impact of trades on daily volatility this article proposes a trading based explanation for the asymmetric effect in daily volatility of individual stock returns previous studies propose two major hypotheses for this phenomenon leverage effect and time varying expected returns however leverage has no impact on asymmetric volatility at the daily frequency and moreover we observe asymmetric volatility for stocks with no leverage also expected returns may vary with the business cycle that is at a lower than daily frequency trading activity of contrarian and herding investors has a robust effect on the relationship between daily volatility and lagged return consistent with the predictions of the rational expectation models the non informational liquidity driven herding trades increase volatility following stock price declines and the informed contrarian trades reduce volatility following stock price increases the results are robust to different measures of volatility and trading activity jel c30 g11 g12 stock return volatility is fundamental to finance contingent claims pricing risk management asset allocation and market efficiency tests use volatility as a basic building block consequently volatility has been widely studied along several dimensions volatility clustering in financial data has been well documented and extensively modeled by the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch of engle 1982 and the generalized arch extension of bollerslev 1986 1 shiller 1981 leroy and porter 1981 roll 1984 1988 french and roll 1986 and cutler poterba and summers 1989 have all documented a significant amount of volatility that cannot be explained by changes in fundamentals and thus may be attributable to mispricing schwert 1989 has studied the variation in stock market volatility over time and has analyzed the

insurance design in the presence of safety nets abstract safety net assistance and insurance exist to manage risk and improve welfare this shared goal may lead to crowding out in a new approach this paper analyzes the interaction of assistance with two dimensions of insurance design level of coverage and types of risks covered in a society of risk averse vulnerable individuals and risk neutral assistance providers pareto improvements in welfare are achieved through incompleteness in the types of risks covered the results imply that safety nets promote demand for and the emergence of incomplete insurance these results have a wide application to insurance markets where safety nets are available including health care disaster aid and social welfare

are invisible hands good hands moral hazard competition and the second best in health care markets the nature and normative properties of competition in health care markets have long been the subject of much debate in this paper we consider what the optimal benchmark is in the presence of moral hazard effects on consumption due to health insurance intuitively it seems that imperfect competition in the health care market may constrain this moral hazard by increasing prices we show that this intuition cannot be correct if insurance markets are competitive a competitive insurance market will always produce a contract that leaves consumers at least as well off under lower prices as under higher prices

a wavelet analysis of mean and volatility spillovers between oil and brics stock markets this paper investigates the spillover effects of volatility and shocks between oil prices and the brics stock markets using multivariate approach and wavelet analysis at different time horizons hence we combine a multivariate arma garch model and wavelet multiresolution analysis to study this phenomenon a bivariate arma 1 1 garch 1 1 cdcc student t model was joined with modwt filter to capture a broad range of possible spillover effects in mean and variances of level prices at various time horizons generally empirical results provide strong evidence of time varying volatility in all markets under study however our proposed approach shows that oil price and stock market prices are directly affected by their own news and volatilities and indirectly affected by the volatilities of other prices and wavelet scale the results show also that mean and volatility spillover effects was decomposed into many sub spillovers on different time scales according to heterogeneous investors and market participants the practical implications of this study are critical innovative and useful for the local and international investors and also for the portfolio managers they can utilize this study to formulate the optimal oil bricks stock portfolios as well as lead to more accurate predictions of volatility spillovers patterns also in developing their hedging strategies

oil price shocks and stock markets in the u s and 13 european countries abstract oil price shocks have a statistically significant impact on real stock returns contemporaneously and or within the following month in the u s and 13 european countries over 1986 1 2005 12 norway as an oil exporter shows a statistically significantly positive response of real stock returns to an oil price increase the median result from variance decomposition analysis is that oil price shocks account for a statistically significant 6 of the volatility in real stock returns for many european countries but not for the u s increased volatility of oil prices significantly depresses real stock returns the contribution of oil price shocks to variability in real stock returns in the u s and most other countries is greater than that of interest rate an increase in real oil price is associated with a significant increase in the short term interest rate in the u s and eight out of 13 european countries within one or two months counter to findings for the u s and for norway there is little evidence of asymmetric effects on real stock returns of positive and negative oil price shocks for oil importing european countries

analyzing volatility spillovers and hedging between oil and stock markets evidence from wavelet analysis abstract this paper examines the linkage of crude oil market wti and stock markets of the g 7 countries we study the mean and volatility spillovers of oil and stock market prices over various time horizons we propose a new approach incorporating both multivariate garch models and wavelet analysis wavelet based mgarch approach we combine a bivariate garch bekk model with wavelet multiresolution analysis in order to capture the multiscale features of mean and volatility spillovers between time series for optimal portfolio allocation decisions we analyze the multiscale behavior of hedge ratio empirical results show strong evidence of significant volatility spillovers between oil and stock markets as well as time varying correlations for various market pairs however results of wavelet coherence indicate that in most the wti market was leading in addition it is stated that the decomposed volatility spillovers permit investors to adapt their hedging strategies

the oregon health insurance experiment evidence from the first year in 2008 a group of uninsured low income adults in oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for medicaid this lottery provides an opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use financial strain and health of low income adults using a randomized controlled design in the year after random assignment the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected we find that in this first year the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations lower out of pocket medical expenditures and medical debt including fewer bills sent to collection and better self reported physical and mental health than the control group

the impact of state tax subsidies for private long term care insurance on coverage and medicaid expenditures abstract in spite of the large expected costs of needing long term care only 10 12 of the elderly population has private insurance coverage medicaid which provides means tested public assistance and pays for almost half of long term care costs spends more than 100 billion annually on long term care in this paper i exploit variation in the adoption and generosity of state tax subsidies for private long term care insurance to determine whether tax subsidies increase private coverage and reduce medicaid s costs for long term care the results indicate that the average tax subsidy raises coverage rates by 2 7 percentage points or 28 however the response is concentrated among high income and asset rich individuals populations with low probabilities of relying on medicaid simulations suggest each dollar of state tax expenditure produces approximately 0 84 in medicaid savings over half of which funnels to the federal government

demographics and the politics of capital taxation in a life cycle economy this article studies the effects of demographics on the mix of tax rates on labor and capital it uses a quantitative general equilibrium overlapping generations model where tax rates are voted without past commitments in every period and characterized as a markov equilibrium in the united states the younger voting age population in 1990 compared to 1965 accounts for the observed decline in the relative capital tax rate between those two years a younger population raises the net return to capital leads voters to increase their savings and results in a preference for lower taxes on capital conversely aging might increase capital taxation

dynamic spillovers between oil and stock markets in the gulf cooperation council countries this article exploits a new spillover directional measure proposed by diebold and yilmaz 2009 2012 to investigate the dynamic spillover of return and volatility between oil and equities in the gulf cooperation council countries during the period 2004 to 2012 our results indicate that return and volatility transmissions are bi directional albeit asymmetric in particular the oil market gives other markets more than it receives in terms of both returns and volatilities these trends were more pronounced in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008 as the net contribution of oil has intensified after a burst during the crisis the empirical evidence from the sample is consistent with a system in which oil is playing the dominant role in the information transmission mechanism between oil and equities in the gcc countries

time varying co movements between energy market and global financial markets implication for portfolio diversification and hedging strategies abstract this study explores the time patterns of volatility spillovers between energy market and stock prices of seven major global financial markets including clean energy energy information technology corporations equity markets and united states economic policy index over the period vary from december 28 2000 to december 31 2018 we employ a time domain connectedness measures of diebold and yilmaz dy 2009 2012 and 2014 to examine spillover mechanism of volatility shocks across future markets optimal weights and hedge ratios are calculated for portfolio diversification and risk management the main findings of the study conclude that oil shocks are exogenous and contribution of oil market volatility to global financial markets is insignificant the returns of world stock index and world energy index are major transmitters of volatility to clean energy market moreover the impact of energy market become strong in global financial market when data is divided into pre during and post financial crisis periods finally the hedge ratios are volatile over time and their maximum value is observed during the financial crisis period of 2008 09 the optimal portfolio between energy and stock prices are heavily weighted to the stock markets

the survival of the welfare state this paper provides an analytical characterization of markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated voting where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution a key result is that the future constituency for redistributive policies depends positively on current redistribution since this affects both private investments and the future distribution of voters the model features multiple equilibria in some equilibria positive redistribution persists forever in other equilibria even a majority of beneficiaries of redistribution vote strategically so as to induce the end of the welfare state next period skill biased technical change makes the survival of the welfare state less likely

are insurance and self insurance substitutes an experimental approach abstract our theory driven laboratory experiment tests a broadened ehrlich and becker substitutability property between insurance and self insurance the data show that an increase in insurance prices does lead to a substitution effect between insurance and self insurance disentangling the two components of the coverage whether and how much to invest suggests that the substitution effect is multilayered a rise in the unit price is likely to crowd the subjects out of the insurance market while fostering the likelihood of investing in self insurance also the demand for insurance of those who remain in the market decreases whereas their demand for self insurance increases however the substitutability effect is mitigated by insufficient sensitivity of the subjects to the price therefore a price subsidy policy is far from being as damaging to self insurance as theory suggests conversely a high priced insurance policy does not encourage investment in loss reduction activities as much as it should policy issues notably for public health as well as for insurers policy are discussed as this research suggests possible ways of steering the pricing policy for insurance

altruism the samaritan s dilemma and government transfer policy this paper shows that altruism provides an efficiency rationale for public provision of insurance to the poor the framework is one in which there are rich altruists and risk averse poor who face some possibility of loss the government represents the rich and makes transfers on their behalf with unconditional transfers the poor may forgo insurance and rely on private charity to bail them out in the event of loss this reliance on private charity has adverse efficiency effects these may be avoided if the government makes in kind transfers of insurance copyright 1995 by american economic association

on the size of u s government political economy in the neoclassical growth model we study a dynamic version of meltzer and richard s median voter model of the size of government taxes are proportional to total income and they are redistributed as equal lump sum transfers voting takes place periodically over time and each consumer votes for the tax rate that maximizes his equilibrium utility we calibrate the model to u s data key elements in the calibration are the income and wealth distribution and the parameters governing the leisure and consumption choices the total size of transfers predicted by our political economy model is quite close to the size of transfers in the data

good volatility bad volatility signed jumps and the persistence of volatility abstract using estimators of the variation of positive and negative returns realized semivariances and high frequency data for the s p 500 index and 105 individual stocks this paper sheds new light on the predictability of equity price volatility we showthat future volatility is more strongly related to the volatility of past negative returns than to that of positive returns and that the impact of a price jump on volatility depends on the sign of the jump with negative positive jumps leading to higher lower future volatility we show that models exploiting these findings lead to significantly better out of sample forecast performance

unemployment insurance in the united states layoff incentives and cross subsidies we survey unemployment insurance ui in the united states and provide new evidence on the ui payroll tax most ui receipt is due to firms that pay part of the ui costs of their layoffs but weak experience rating leads most firms to pay considerably less than the full costs industries consistently receiving subsidies from the ui system are construction manufacturing and mining finally a large fraction of layoffs resulting in payment of ui are made by firms that are not charged for the costs of the claim because they have employed the individual for less than 2 quarters

volatility spillover between oil and agricultural commodity markets abstract this study examines volatility transmission between oil and selected agricultural commodity prices wheat corn soybeans and sugar we apply the newly developed causality in variance test and impulse response functions to daily data from 01 january 1986 to 21 march 2011 in order to identify the impact of the food price crisis the data are divided into two sub periods the pre crisis period 01 january 1986 to 31 december 2005 and the post crisis period 01 january 2006 21 march 2011 the variance causality test shows that while there is no risk transmission between oil and agricultural commodity markets in the pre crisis period oil market volatility spills on the agricultural markets with the exception of sugar in the post crisis period the impulse response analysis also indicates that a shock to oil price volatility is transmitted to agricultural markets only in the post crisis period this paper thereby shows that the dynamics of volatility transmission changes significantly following the food price crisis after the crisis risk transmission emerges as another dimension of the dynamic interrelationships between energy and agricultural markets

asymmetric volatility connectedness on the forex market abstract we show how bad and good volatility propagate through the forex market i e we provide evidence for asymmetric volatility connectedness on the forex market using high frequency intra day data of the most actively traded currencies over 2007 2015 we document the dominating asymmetries in spillovers that are due to bad rather than good volatility we also show that negative spillovers are chiefly tied to the dragging sovereign debt crisis in europe while positive spillovers are correlated with the subprime crisis different monetary policies among key world central banks and developments on commodities markets it seems that a combination of monetary and real economy events is behind the positive asymmetries in volatility spillovers while fiscal factors are linked with negative spillovers

intertemporal transfer institutions abstract we consider a single commodity overlapping generations model where at a cost institutions can be created or transformed to carry out intergenerational transfers we analyze the game with both strategic and cooperative methods characterizing the unique stationary equilibrium as well as the set of transfer institutions that belong to the core which we show to coincide with the consistent core we conclude that as long as the creation of an institution is costly it is possible to sustain positive transfers though those will be below the optimal level moreover the lower the costs the more efficient the transfer will be journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72 d23 e21 h55

volatility spillovers between crude oil and chinese sectoral equity markets evidence from a frequency dynamics perspective abstract we examine the frequency dynamics of volatility spillovers between crude oil and china s stock markets in a spectral representation framework of generalized forecast error variance decomposition using sectoral stock indices data we find evidence of total volatility spillover driven mainly by short term spillovers the net spillovers of the oil market are almost all positive and dominated by short ter m components although the spillover during china s 2015 financial crisis is negative and attributable to long term components in addition there exists heterogeneity in net pairwise frequency spillovers between the oil and sectoral stock markets moreover structural breaks in volatilities appear to be a significant feature of volatility spillovers finally frequency spillovers in our system can predict future stock market volatility these results have economic implications for investors and policymakers

the economics of health and health care what have we learned what have i learned victor fuchs and i have been talking with each other about the economics of health and health care since we met nearly 30 years ago i was pleased therefore when he asked me to organize this session of his american economic association annual meeting but then rather dismayed by his suggestion that as one of the papers in the session i offer an overview of what i have learned about the subject during those 30 years as a profession we have indeed learned a great deal in these three decades the rapid growth of health care spending that doubled its gdp share to one seventh of the economy and the 1966 medicare and medicaid programs that have made federal health care spending exceed the combined total of all domestic discretionary federal outlays have attracted a generation of researchers to a subject that had been largely neglected by economists before the 1960 s 1 econometric research and conceptual developments have been mutually reinforcing helped by advances in econometric theory and by the government s creation of a rich array of detailed data although there remains substantial controversy about many issues in this field as in most other parts of economics there is no doubt that anyone setting out to teach a course on health economics or to do policy analysis in this area would start from a very different base today than 30 years ago

transmission of shocks and contagion from u s to mena equity markets the role of oil and gas markets abstract using a multifactor model augmented with oil and gas returns this paper examines contagion from the us to mena equity markets and studies the role of energy price fluctuations in amplifying the dependence between the us and mena equity markets we provide empirical evidence of a strong contagion effect originating from the us to mena equity markets the regional oil and gas factors account for the bulk of the variance of the mena equity returns and our findings suggest that the oil and gas markets play an important role in strengthening the dependence between the mena and us markets during episodes of market turmoil we discuss the policymaking importance of our results and propose a strategy to curb the adverse effects of us return shocks on mena equity markets during episodes of stress

oil prices and the global economy is it different this time around abstract the recent plunge in oil prices has brought into question the generally accepted view that lower oil prices are good for the us and the global economy in this paper using a quarterly multi country econometric model we first show that a fall in oil prices lowers interest rates and inflation in most countries and increases global real equity prices the effects on real output are positive although they take longer to materialize around 4 quarters after the shock we then re examine the effects of low oil prices on the us economy over different sub periods using monthly observations on real oil prices real equity prices and real dividends we confirm the perverse positive relationship between oil and equity prices over the period since the 2008 financial crisis highlighted in the recent literature but show that this relationship has been unstable when considered over the longer time period of 1946 2016 in contrast we find a stable negative relationship between oil prices and real dividends which we argue is a better proxy for economic activity as compared to equity prices on the supply side the effects of lower oil prices differ widely across the different oil producers and could be perverse initially as some of the major oil producers try to compensate their loss of revenues by raising production taking demand and supply adjustments to oil price changes as a whole we conclude that oil markets equilibrate but rather slowly with large episodic swings between low and high oil prices

oil volatility shocks and the stock markets of oil importing mena economies a tale from the financial crisis abstract the role of oil price volatility in predicting the stock market volatility of small oil importing countries that have a substantial number of investors from neighboring oil exporting countries remains unexplored to refine our basic understanding of this role this paper proposes a methodological extension of the recently developed causality in variance procedure and considers the case of lebanon and jordan these two heavy importers of oil are interesting in the sense that they are located in a region with a large number of rich oil exporting countries so their stock markets are tied to oil exporters by way of foreign investors the conditional mean and variance of returns are modeled within an armax garch framework that accommodates three salient features of the data namely autocorrelation day of the week effects and movements in international markets for comparison purposes the stock markets of morocco and tunisia are also included in the study empirical analyses highlight the dynamic effects of the global financial crisis on the volatility spillovers between oil and the stock markets of oil importing countries and provide more insights into the seemingly contradictory effects of being oil importers while having investors from oil exporting countries the main results indicate that the volatility spillover is much more apparent from the world oil market to the stock market of jordan than the other way around whereas oil volatility is not a good predictor of lebanese stock market volatility finally policy practical implications and conclusions for future research are drawn