the incremental information content of investor fear gauge for volatility forecasting in the crude oil futures market abstract this paper aims to investigate whether investor fear gauge ifg contains incremental information content for forecasting the volatility of crude oil futures for this purpose we use oil volatility index ovx to measure the ifg adding the ifg to existing heterogeneous autoregressive har models we develop many har models with ifg subsequently we employ these har models to predict the volatility of crude oil futures the results from the parameter estimation and out of sample forecasting show that the in sample and out of sample performances of har models with ifg are significantly better than their corresponding har models without ifg the results are robust in different ways thus the har models with ifg are more beneficial to the decision making of all participants including financial traders manufacturers and policymakers in the crude oil futures market more importantly the results suggest that the investor fear gauge has a significant positive effect on volatility forecasting and can help improve the performances of almost all the existing har models

electricity market integration decarbonisation and security of supply dynamic volatility connectedness in the irish and great britain markets abstract this study investigates the volatility connectedness between the irish and great britain electricity markets and how it is driven by changes in energy policy institutional structures and political ideologies we assess various aspects of this volatility connectedness including static unconditional vs dynamic conditional symmetric vs asymmetric characteristics between 2009 and 2018 we find that the volatility connectedness is time varying and it is significantly affected by important events policy reforms or market re designs such as brexit oil price slump an increasing share of renewables and fluctuations in the exchange rates our asymmetric analysis shows that magnitude of the good volatility connectedness is marginally larger than that of the bad volatility connectedness our result suggests that good volatility levels would be even higher once the irish market adopts the carbon price floor therefore supporting renewable generation by setting an appropriate price of carbon in interconnected wholesale electricity markets will improve market integration

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

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

the impact of jumps on carry trade returns abstract this paper investigates how jump risks are priced in currency markets we find that currencies whose changes are more sensitive to negative market jumps provide significantly higher expected returns the positive risk premium constitutes compensation for the extreme losses during periods of market turmoil using the empirical findings we propose a jump modified carry trade strategy which has approximately two percentage point per annum higher returns than the regular carry trade strategy these findings result from the fact that negative jump betas are significantly related to the riskiness of currencies and business conditions

up and downside variance risk premia in global equity markets abstract this paper provides novel insights into the dynamic properties of variance and semivariance premia considering nine international stock market indices we find consistent evidence of significantly negative total and downside semi variance premia of around 15 bps per month these premia almost exclusively compensate investors for the risk of extreme negative returns we also document pronounced downside semivariance premia for longer times to maturity while the term structure of the total variance premium is upward sloping for all of the considered indices the slope is driven by upside semivariance premia which are positive over long horizons they can only be negative in adverse states characterized by high uncertainty and high risk aversion we show that a general equilibrium model featuring external habit formation and bad environment good environment dynamics for consumption and dividends can explain many of these stylized facts and highlight the economic mechanisms

roughing it up including jump components in the measurement modeling and forecasting of return volatility a rapidly growing literature has documented important improvements in financial return volatility measurement and forecasting via use of realized variation measures constructed from high frequency returns coupled with simple modeling procedures building on recent theoretical results in barndorff nielsen and shephard 2004a 2005 for related bi power variation measures the present paper provides a practical and robust framework for non parametrically measuring the jump component in asset return volatility in an application to the dm exchange rate the s p500 market index and the 30 year u s treasury bond yield we find that jumps are both highly prevalent and distinctly less persistent than the continuous sample path variation process moreover many jumps appear directly associated with specific macroeconomic news announcements separating jump from non jump movements in a simple but sophisticated volatility forecasting model we find that almost all of the predictability in daily weekly and monthly return volatilities comes from the non jump component our results thus set the stage for a number of interesting future econometric developments and important financial applications by separately modeling forecasting and pricing the continuous and jump components of the total return variation process

which garch model for option valuation characterizing asset return dynamics using volatility models is an important part of empirical finance the existing literature on garch models favors some rather complex volatility specifications whose relative performance is usually assessed through their likelihood based on a time series of asset returns this paper compares a range of garch models along a different dimension using option prices and returns under the risk neutral as well as the physical probability measure we judge the relative performance of various models by evaluating an objective function based on option prices in contrast with returns based inference we find that our option based objective function favors a relatively parsimonious model specifically when evaluated out of sample our analysis favors a model that besides volatility clustering only allows for a standard leverage effect

do negative and positive equity returns share the same volatility dynamics abstract this paper investigates whether positive and negative returns share the same dynamic volatility process the well established stylized facts on volatility persistence and asymmetric effects are re examined in light of such dichotomy to analyze the dynamics of down and up volatilities estimated from daily returns i use a bivariate generalization of the standard egarch model as a robustness check i also investigate various specifications of down and up realized measures estimated from high frequency data the empirical findings point to the existence of a marked diversity in the volatilities of positive and negative daily returns in terms of persistence and sensitivity to good and bad news a simple forecasting exercise highlights the striking performance of the proposed approach even during the crisis period

can stock volatility be benign new measurements and macroeconomic implications we find nonsynchronized movements of two new measures of financial market uncertainty good and bad volatility which are based on the maximum and minimum stock prices within a month good bad volatility is associated with better worse expectations about the future economic situation and clearly signals acceleration deceleration in economic activity the var results indicate that i output employment and stock price plummet rapidly in response to a bad volatility shock while their responses to a good volatility shock are modest and ii bad volatility shocks explain the bulk of economic activity and stock price fluctuations in the medium run

crude oil price volatility and short term predictability of the real u s gdp growth rate abstract the predictive power contained in crude oil price volatility with regards to forecasting the real u s gdp growth rate is evaluated contrary to models based on the price of crude oil specifications employing crude oil price volatility tend to afford statistically significant improvements in terms of population level predictability and finite sample forecast accuracy relative to the benchmark at the one quarter ahead horizon

good bad cojumps and volatility forecasting new evidence from crude oil and the u s stock markets abstract in this article we investigate the impacts of jumps cojumps and their signed components on forecasting oil futures price volatility in the framework of the heterogeneous autoregressive realized volatility model our empirical results reveal several noteworthy findings first the effects of signed jumps and cojumps based on the daily and intraday jump tests on future volatility are asymmetric and the negative components are much more powerful in forecasting volatility moreover our proposed models including the signed jump and cojump components are able to generate higher forecasting accuracy and we find that disentangling the effects of positive and negative jumps and cojumps can significantly improve forecasts of future volatility lastly our findings are reliable for various robustness checks and our study provides some new insights into forecasting oil price realized volatility which are useful for researchers market participants and policymakers

agricultural productivity growth in brazil large and small farms excel abstract the long standing debate on the relationship between farm size and productivity has been generally limited by the range of farm sizes evaluated and the definition of productivity in this paper we use data from three brazilian agricultural censuses to address these issues in particular we introduce a wider distribution of farm sizes than presently available from the literature and we employ total factor productivity tfp as our performance measure in doing so we test which farm size class had the highest tfp levels in 1985 and 2006 how factor productivity growth varied within and across farm size classes between those years and which policy or factor had the greatest productivity enhancing effect when examining tfp growth we move beyond the common decomposition into technical and efficiency changes by identifying the complete distribution of farm productivity performances we find that by 2006 a u shaped distribution of productivity over farm sizes had emerged considerable 1985 2006 tfp growth differences are prevalent positive rates for the majority accompany stagnant or negative rates for some public education investments were associated with faster productivity growth regardless of farm size while technical assistance s positive effect and credit s negative effect were associated with larger farm sizes the role of specialization varied by size

the relation between farm size and farm productivity the role of family labor supervision and credit constraints abstract the paper shows that if the performance of hired farmhands is affected by supervision from family members and if the availability of credit is dependent on the amount of land owned then a systematic positive or negative relationship between per acre yields and farm size will prevail a model with no supervision effects on labor productivity would predict that yields are unaffected by farm size the paper also investigates the relation between land utilization and owned holding size when land rental possibilities are limited results are shown to be compatible with various observed patterns in ldcs

higher moment risk premiums for the crude oil market a downside and upside conditional decomposition abstract relying on options written on the uso an exchange traded fund tracking the daily price changes of the wti light sweet crude oil we extract variance and skew risk premiums in a model free way we further decompose these risk premiums into downside and upside conditional components and show that they can be partially explained by uso excess returns and more importantly these decomposed risk premiums enable a much better prediction of uso excess returns than the standard or undecomposed variance and skew risk premiums a comparison with existing results for the equity index option market further confirms the usefulness of the decomposition for the crude oil market

agricultural policy and productivity evidence from brazilian censuses brazil s economic strategy has shifted hesitatingly during the last several decades from one of producer protection to trade competitiveness exploiting the variations these shifts have afforded we use a sequence of decennial agricultural censuses to examine brazilian policy implications for agricultural competitiveness and efficiency total factor productivity is decomposed into best technology and efficiency elements each subject to policy influence we find technology growth at 4 5 per annum to have been extraordinarily high particularly in the south but because productivity among average producers has fallen rapidly behind that on the technical frontier total productivity growth has been a much more modest 2 6 per year public agricultural research programs most benefit the country s technological leaders widening the gap between frontier and average producer credit education and road construction policies instead narrow that gap credit and road programs especially enhance efficiency in the south where efficiency losses have been greatest jel classification o2 o3

forecasting the realized volatility of the oil futures market a regime switching approach considering nonlinear and highly persistent dynamics of realized volatility we introduce markov regime switching models to the heterogeneous autoregressive model of the realized volatility har rv models to forecast the realized volatility of the crude oil futures market in sample results demonstrate that the high volatility regime is short lived out of sample results suggest that har rv models with regime switching increase the forecasting ability significantly than those without regime switching moreover these findings are robust for different actual volatility benchmarks forecasting windows and model settings

news good or bad and its impact on volatility predictions over multiple horizons we examine whether the sign and magnitude of intra daily returns have impact on expected volatility the next day or over longer future horizons we first let the data speak namely with minimal interference we capture the mapping between intra daily returns and future volatility we revisit the concept of news impact curves introduced by engle and ng 1993 overall we find that moderately good intra daily news reduces volatility the next day while both very good news unusual high intra daily positive returns and bad news negative returns increase volatility with the latter having a more severe impact the asymmetries disappear over longer horizons we also introduce a new class of parametric models which feature asymmetries and with close ties to arch type models albeit applicable to a mixture of high and low frequency data models featuring asymmetries dominate especially during the 2007 2008 financial crisis

tails fears and risk premia we show that the compensation for rare events accounts for a large fraction of the average equity and variance risk premia exploiting the special structure of the jump tails and the pricing thereof we identify and estimate a new investor fears index the index reveals large time varying compensation for fears of disasters our empirical investigations involve new extreme value theory approximations and high frequency intraday data for estimating the expected jump tails under the statistical probability measure and short maturity out of the money options and new model free implied variation measures for estimating the corresponding risk neutral expectations

integrated portfolio management with options in this paper we examine the problem of managing portfolios consisting of both stocks and options for the simultaneous optimization of stock and option positions we base our analysis on the generally accepted mean variance framework first we analyze the effects of options on the mean variance efficient frontier if they are considered as separate investment alternatives due to the resulting asymmetric portfolio return distribution mean variance analysis will be not sufficient to identify optimal optioned portfolios additional investor preferences which are expressed in terms of shortfall constraints allow a more detailed portfolio specification under a mean variance and shortfall preference structure we then derive optioned portfolios with a maximum expected return to circumvent the technical optimization problems arising from stochastic constraints we use an approximation of the return distribution and develop economically meaningful conditions under which the complex optimization problem can be transformed into a linear problem being comparably easy to solve empirical results based on both empirical market data and monte carlo simulations illustrate the portfolio optimization procedure with options

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

forecasting the volatility of crude oil futures using intraday data abstract we use the information in intraday data to forecast the volatility of crude oil at a horizon of 1 66 days using a variety of models relying on the decomposition of realized variance in its positive or negative semivariances part and its continuous or discontinuous part jumps we show the importance of these decompositions in predictive in sample regressions using a number of specifications nevertheless an important empirical finding comes from an out of sample analysis which unambiguously shows the limited interest of considering these components overall our results indicates that a simple autoregressive specification mimicking long memory and using past realized variances as predictors does not perform significantly worse than more sophisticated models which include the various components of realized variance

regulated competition in health care with or without a global budget abstract a major dilemma with respect to market oriented health care reforms is that politicians strongly focus on cost containment in the sense of stabilizing the fraction of gross national product to be spent on health care however we can not exclude the option that more competition will yield higher total health care costs this might induce politicians to put a global budget on health care expenditures in this paper we focus on the question whether regulated competition in health care should not be combined with a global budget

from regulated cartel to regulated competition in the dutch health care system abstract health care reform is quite a hot issue in the netherlands today since the early seventies government has been trying to contain health care costs by direct control over prices and productive capacities as the results of this policy were disappointing several proposals were formulated for a structural reform based on a market oriented approach in 1988 the dutch government decided to radically reform the financial structure and organization of the health care system two major issues are the introduction of a national health insurance basic insurance and regulated competition among insurers and among providers compared with the last 15 years this can be considered a 180 degree change over of health care policy because of the revolutionary character of the proposals one can really speak of a perestrojka in the dutch health care system in this paper the recent developments in the dutch health care system will be reviewed first we will deal with the necessity of change in the dutch health care system then the main lines of the government proposals for a new structure of the health care system will be summarized finally the consequences of these proposals for the various parties involved will be discussed

the asymmetric volatility in the gold market revisited abstract based on 13 5 years of intraday data this paper sheds light on the inverse asymmetric volatility effect inherent in the gold market after decomposing realized volatility into positive and negative semivariance rolling estimations of the har model uncover the relative importance of the long term positive semivariance and reveal the dynamics of the individual volatility components over time two effects are identified the relevance of the short term negative semivariance is rather pervasive while the impact of the positive semivariance is strongly correlated with the overall development of the gold market the asymmetric nature of gold price volatility is multi faceted and hence more complex than previously documented

forecasting the good and bad uncertainties of crude oil prices using a har framework abstract good or bad uncertainty is the volatility that is associated with positive or negative innovations to asset prices this paper proposes new heterogeneous autoregressive type har type models to forecast the good and bad uncertainties of crude oil prices in this paper we investigate the effects of lagged bad and good uncertainties daily positive and negative signed jump variations and leverages on predicting good and bad uncertainties by in sample and out of sample analysis the in sample results show that bad and good uncertainties have long memory property and the predictability of long term good and bad uncertainties is stronger than that of short and mid term good and bad uncertainties the out of sample results indicate that lagged bad or good uncertainties daily positive signed jump variation and daily negative signed jump variation contain incremental out of sample information for forecasting good or bad uncertainties and in most cases lagged leverages also play indispensable roles in forecasting the good and bad uncertainties in the crude oil market moreover the results of out of sample analysis remain robust across using the other estimation window other har type models and the other sample

good volatility bad volatility and option pricing advances in variance analysis permit the splitting of the total quadratic variation of a jump diffusion process into upside and downside components recent studies establish that this decomposition enhances volatility predictions and highlight the upside downside variance spread as a driver of the asymmetry in stock price distributions to appraise the economic gain of this decomposition we design a new and flexible option pricing model in which the underlying asset price exhibits distinct upside and downside semivariance dynamics driven by the model free proxies of the variances the new model outperforms common benchmarks especially the alternative that splits the quadratic variation into diffusive and jump components

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

the cross market dynamic effects of liquidity on volatility evidence from chinese stock index and futures markets abstractthis article investigates the cross market asymmetric dynamic effects of liquidity on realized volatility and its intersection with jump volatility between chinese stock index and futures m

organizing the health insurance market this paper presents a new approach to organizing universal health insurance first the government divides the entire population into many large groups then the government creates a federal health insurance system healthfed modeled on the federal reserve system to fill the role now played by the benefits office of a large firm the healthfed would create a short menu of alternatives solicit bids for insuring the entire group and price alternatives there would be redistribution between groups and pricing of alterna tives to reflect optimal social insurance principles there would be no connection between health insurance and employment it may seem odd that this presidential address is my first publication in health economics at the time when i might have been working on an alternative address i was chair of an expert panel for the advisory council on social security looking at issues in both retirement income and medical care 2 in the process of this work i have come up with a new approach to organizing universal health insurance that is the subject of this paper before starting on health insurance i will say a few words about a wider context offering what i will say as an example in that setting 3 a great deal of attention has been focused on the exciting issue of reorganizing economies dropping central planning commonly economists from those countries em brace capitalism or more specifically laissez faire competition with an enthusi asm which exceeds that ofwestern economists although not necessarily western businessmen yet laissez faire capitalism has received little serious support in the west for a very long time we all know the fundamental welfare theorem which shows many ways that capitalism can be imperfect we have also seen a growth in discussion and analysis of the many ways governments can mess up resource allocation the real question is the design of arrangements that try to integrate the things that each type of institution does better this is hard for two reasons one is that it is in the realm of second best with many constraints the more the constraints the harder the analysis the second is that we do not have good positive theories of government behavior good examples yes good theories no thus the analysis is more intuitive less theory driven than in our picture of private markets but also in our private market analyses we have been greatly complicating our picture recognizing all sorts of information imperfec tions that affect the way that private markets work so i will present to you a proposal for universal health insurance meant to combine something that

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

inverse productivity land quality labor markets and measurement error abstract this paper examines the role that land quality and imperfect markets play in generating the inverse productivity relationship in the international crop research institute for the semi arid tropics icrisat data differences in land quality largely explain the inverse productivity ip relationship in the random effects profit regression but not in labor demand regressions controlling for labor and land market failures and differences in soil quality eliminates the ip relationship for male labor but not female labor in the random effects estimates the inverse relationship is much stronger in fixed effects than random effects estimates suggesting that the farm size variable may be subject to measurement error a view supported by the results of instrumental variables estimation