quantile serial dependence in crude oil markets evidence from improved quantilogram analysis with quantile wild bootstrapping we examine the quantile serial dependence in crude oil prices based on the linton and whang s quantile based portmanteau test which we improved by means of quantile wild bootstrapping qwb through monte carlo simulation we find that the quantile wild bootstrap based portmanteau test performs better than the bound testing procedure suggested by linton and whang we apply the improved test to examine the efficiency of two crude oil markets wti and brent we also examine if the dependence is stable via rolling sample tests our results show that both wti and brent are serially dependent in all except the median quantiles these findings suggest that it may be misleading to examine the efficiency of crude oil markets in terms of mean or median returns only these crude oil markets are relatively more serially dependent in non median ranges

pareto improving campaign finance policy this paper argues that campaign finance policy in the form of contribution limits and matching public financing can be pareto improving even under very optimistic assumptions concerning the role of campaign advertising and the rationality of voters the optimistic assumptions are that candidates use campaign contributions to convey truthful information to voters about their qualifications for office and that voters update their beliefs rationally on the basis of the information they have seen the argument also assumes that campaign contributions are provided by interest groups and that candidates can offer to provide policy favors to attract higher contributions

effects of oil price shocks on the stock market performance do nature of shocks and economies matter the main focus of this study is to examine how oil price fluctuations influence the performance of stock markets this study used the causality approach developed by toda and yamamoto 1995 to explore the causality between oil prices and stock prices in the long run and their short term impact the generalized impulse response functions were applied to the monthly data in the period from january 1997 to july 2013 in this study to capture the different characteristics of oil refining exporting and importing three asian economies were examined the results indicate that the manner in which a market reacts to hikes in oil prices varies between different markets and periods this depends on differences in the oil characteristics of the economy and the nature of the shock in oil prices

hot stuff index insurance for indian pepper growers summary we simulate the impact of a joint price and yield index insurance on the basis of a small representative panel data set of indian smallholder pepper growers affordable and feasible index insurance reduces crop revenue risk to around 68 of its original level while a reduction to 50 of this level can be achieved with ideal insurance basis risk is large for only a small fraction of farm households depending on risk aversion 5 30 of farm households is willing to pay for index insurance increasing to 12 50 with a 50 premium reduction opportunity costs of consumption smoothing in the form of lower productivity levels suggest potential welfare gains of specialization with insurance

the impact of campaign expenditures on political competition in the french legislative elections of 1993 we use regression analysis to estimate the effect that campaign money had on the votes of challengers and incumbents in the 1993 elections to the french legislative assembly incumbent candidates can at best expect to win 1 01 of the popular vote for each extra franc they spend per registered voter in their district challengers can expect to win at least twice as much as this simulations show that if campaign spending ceilings were halved incumbents would have gained an extra ten percent of the popular vote over their closest challenging rivals the regression analysis also suggests that voters react negatively to candidates who rely heavily on their own money for their outlays and reward candidates who rely on contributions from private individuals these results suggest that campaign spending ceilings may inhibit political competition and that voters may resist a candidate who relies on narrow sources of funding

panel evidence on the ability of oil returns to predict stock returns in the g7 area abstract most studies on the ability of oil returns to predict stock returns use time series data for multiple countries the data therefore have a panel structure yet oddly enough this structure is never really exploited in the estimation but researchers tend to instead rely on country by country application of existing time series methods this practice is wasteful because it does not explore all available information the present paper can be seen as a reaction to this the purpose is to reevaluate the existing empirical evidence for the g7 countries using state of the art panel data techniques the results show that for the panel as a whole lagged oil price returns has a significantly negative effect on current stock returns the evidence at the individual country level is less strong and varies depending on the extent to which the countries rely on oil import

selling favors in the lab experiments on campaign finance reform campaign advertising can provide benefits to constituencies when used to fund the distribution of useful information but voters can be harmed if candidates finance such advertising by trading policy favors to special interests in exchange for contributions we report data from novel laboratory campaign finance experiments that shed light on this tradeoff and that provide rigorous empirical evidence on formal campaign finance theory our key finding is that voters respond to advertising differently between special interest and publicly financed campaigns and that the nature of this difference is qualitatively consistent with formal models predictions

behavioural development economics lessons from field labs in the developing world abstract explanations of poverty growth and development depend on the assumptions made about individual preferences and the willingness to engage in strategic behaviour economic experiments especially those conducted in the field have begun to paint a picture of economic agents in developing communities that is at variance with the traditional portrait we review this growing literature with an eye towards preference related experiments conducted in the field we also offer lessons on what development economists might learn from experiments we conclude by sharing our thoughts on how to conduct experiments in the field and then offer a few ideas for future research

does oil move equity prices a global view many studies indicate that oil price shocks have an adverse effect on real output and hence an adverse effect on corporate profits where oil is used as a key input the present study examines whether and to what extent the adverse effect of oil price shocks impacts stock market returns to this end we analyse 35 datastream global industry indices for the period from april 1983 to september 2005 our findings indicate that oil price rises have a negative impact on equity returns for all sectors except mining and oil and gas industries generally these results are consistent with economic theory and evidence provided by previous empirical studies little evidence of any asymmetry is detected in the oil price sensitivities in light of our findings we recommend that international portfolio investors consider hedging oil price risk

firm specific impacts of co2 prices on the stock market value of the spanish power industry abstract european union carbon emissions allowances eua price fluctuations can affect electricity companies stock market values as these oscillations may change firms profitability and thus investors decisions this outcome can differ not only contingent on the eu ets phase but also on firms generation mix moreover stock markets may react differently to eua increases in comparison to decreases thus asymmetrically by using daily data from january 2008 to july 2014 this article analyses long run equilibrium relations and short run interactions between the aggregated electricity industry stock market returns and eua price changes moreover we test if the relationship between eua price variations and electricity stock returns is asymmetric and if the carbon price effect and the asymmetry are power firm specific adding to earlier studies we initially provide an inspection of the individual impact of eu ets phase ii and on going phase iii followed by a comparative analysis between power firms which core activity relies on renewable energy sources and those whose sources are fundamentally non renewable ones a statistically significant positive long run impact of eu ets on the aggregated power sector stock market return is found concerning phase ii and works asymmetrically moreover evidence is provided demonstrating that asymmetry and eua effects are power firm specific

extreme risk spillovers between crude oil and stock markets abstract this paper investigates the spillovers of extreme risks between crude oil and stock markets using daily data of the s p 500 stock index and west texas intermediate wti crude oil futures returns based on the method of granger causality in risk value at risk var is employed to measure market risk and a class of kernel based tests is used to detect negative and positive risk spillover effects empirical results reveal that there are significant risk spillovers between the two markets extreme movements past or current in one market may have a significant predictive power for those in the other market prior to the recent financial crisis there are positive risk spillovers from stock market to crude oil market and negative spillovers from crude oil market to stock market after the financial crisis bidirectional positive risk spillovers are strengthened markedly the risk spillovers may occur instantaneously and or with a long time delay both positive and negative risk spillover effects exhibit asymmetric correlations

some talk money in politics a partial review of the literature the financing of political campaigns is an area of active scholarly study i review some of the recent literature and discuss important methodological issues that arise in empir ical research on campaign expenditures and campaign contributions the effects of campaign expenditures and advertising on candidate and ballot measure elections are summarized as are the impacts of contributions on contributors welfare many states have changed their campaign finance laws in the past few years and i describe work that exploits variations in these laws a discussion of the strategies used by interest groups to allocate their campaign contributions provides insights into contributors motives

media proliferation and democratic transition in africa the case of madagascar summary state controlled media have historically dominated press outlets across much of africa yet recently economic and political liberalization together with new communication technologies have triggered rapid growth and increasing private sector involvement changes which hold potentially important implications for development and governance this paper explores the origins and impact of recent private sector media growth in madagascar where over 90 private radio stations and 15 private television stations have begun operation over the past decade the resulting profusion of private media has played a key role in improving governance most recently in the hotly contested presidential election of 2001

on dynamic linkages of the state natural gas markets in the usa evidence from an empirical spatio temporal network quantile analysis we empirically investigate the dynamic linkages of the state level natural gas markets in the usa by introducing a novel spatio temporal network quantile econometric model we can estimate the dynamic cross state dependency or market integration of the state level natural gas markets and the dependence of the state natural gas markets on the national crude oil market at different quantile levels we find that significant local dynamic neighbouring market integrations exist in the natural gas markets not only in the eastern and central states as evidenced in the literature but also in some western and southwest states our results also show that there are significant linkages of the state level natural gas markets to the national crude oil market through the lagged price shocks and the long run price equilibrium with the national gas markets under varying price shock propagations the results can help local government and energy users to mitigate the negative impacts from the expected or unexpected fluctuations in the oil and the neighbouring natural gas markets which will enact appropriate state level price discovery and energy policy and investment decision makings

nonparametric panel data model for crude oil and stock market prices in net oil importing countries abstract this paper introduces an innovative nonparametric panel data approach to model the long run relationship between the monthly oil price index and stock market price indices of ten large net oil importing countries namely the united states japan china south korea india germany france singapore italy and spain in the proposed model we allow the coefficient on the oil price index to be a time varying function which evolves over time in a way that is assumed to be unknown we also allow the common trend function to evolve over time as well as extending the model further to incorporate country specific trend functions we employ a data driven local linear method to estimate these time varying trend and coefficient functions the results show that despite being largely positive there are several downward trends reflecting the aftermath of the iraq war and the recent unprecedented drop in the oil price overall we find that the nonparametric panel data model better captures the way in which the underlying stock oil price relationship has evolved over time in comparison to the point estimates of the parametric counterpart moreover we find that stock market fundamentals play a significant role in determining the oil stock price relationship our findings have important implication for policymakers and financial speculators

persistent media bias abstract the news media plays an essential role in society but surveys indicate that the public views the media as biased this paper presents a theory of media bias that originates with private information obtained by journalists through their investigations and persists despite profit maximizing news organizations and rivalry from other news organizations bias has two effects on the demand for news first rational individuals are more skeptical of potentially biased news and thus rely less on it in their decision making this skepticism reduces demand and leads the news organization to set a lower price for its publication the greater is the bias it tolerates lower quality news thus commands a lower price second bias makes certain stories more likely than others given their private information journalists may bias their stories if their career prospects can be advanced by being published on the front page news organizations can control bias by restricting the discretion allowed to journalists but granting discretion and tolerating bias can increase profits if it allows journalists to be hired at a lower wage bias is not driven from the market by a rival news organization nor by a news organization with an opposing bias and the profits of a high bias news organization can be higher than the profits of a low bias one moreover bias can be greater with competition than with a monopoly news organization if individuals collectively choose regulation in place of their individual decision making bias increases the expected stringency of regulation

the relationship between energy and equity markets evidence from volatility impulse response functions this paper examines the relationship between the energy and equity markets by estimating volatility impulse response functions from a multivariate bekk model of the goldman sach s energy index and the sp in addition we also calculate the time varying conditional correlations and time varying dynamic hedge ratios from volatility impulse response functions we find that low sp however we find only a weak response from s p 500 volatility to energy price shocks moreover our dynamic hedge ratio analysis suggests that the energy index is generally a poor hedging instrument

competition and truth in the market for news in this essay we evaluate the case for competition in news markets from the perspective of economics first we consider the simple proposition that when more points of view are heard and defended beliefs will converge to the truth this concept of competition is several steps removed from market competition among actual media firms but it has played a prominent role in the legal arguments for a free press we then explore three mechanisms by which increasing competition or more precisely increasing the number of independently owned firms can limit bias or distortions that originate on the supply side of the media market first when governments attempt to manipulate news competition can increase the likelihood that the media remain independent second when news providers have an interest in manipulating consumers beliefs diversity in such incentives can reduce the risk of information being suppressed or distorted third competition may drive firms to invest in providing timely and accurate coverage overall we argue that there are robust reasons to expect competition to be effective in disciplining supply side bias next we ask how the effect of competition changes when distortions originate on the demand side of the market when consumers themselves demand biased or less socially relevant news we find that increased competition may or may not improve welfare in these cases though we caution against using this as a justification for concentrating media power in the hands of state controlled or regulated firms

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

occupational choice and the spirit of capitalism the british industrial revolution triggered a socioeconomic transformation whereby the landowning aristocracy was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group we propose a theory of preference formation under financial market imperfections that can account for this pattern parents shape their children s preferences in response to economic incentives middle class families in occupations requiring effort skill and experience develop patience and a work ethic whereas upper class families relying on rental income cultivate a refined taste for leisure these class specific attitudes which are rooted in the nature of preindustrial professions become key determinants of success once industrialization transforms the economic landscape i introduction the industrial revolution was more than capital accumulation and growth it also set off a social and political transformation that redefined hierarchies in society and reshaped the distribution of income and wealth before the onset of industrialization in eighteenth century britain wealth and political power were associated with the possession of land over the course of the nineteenth century a new class of entrepreneurs and businessmen emerged as the economic elite for the most part the members of this class rose from humble beginnings and had their social origins in the urban middle classes the landed elite was left behind and eventually lost its political and economic predominance many observers of the time linked this reversal in economic fortunes to differences in values attitudes and ultimately preferences across social classes there are countless examples both in scholarly and in fictional writing of portrayals of members of the landowning class as averse to work unwilling to save ill disposed tocommercialactivity andunabletoconsidermoneyassomething

electoral contributions and the cost of unpopularity when considering electoral campaigns candidates receiving contributions from relatively unpopular industries should be regarded less favorably by voters that have information on the sources of funding to offset this unpopularity effect politicians may either demand more money for campaign advertising from these industries in order to persuade less informed voters or shy away from unpopular contributors to avoid losing the support of the informed electorate our model predicts that the first effect dominates and electoral contributions are increasing in industry unpopularity by using u s house elections data and different identification strategies we provide robust evidence in favor of our predictions jel d72 p16

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

systemic risk spillovers between crude oil and stock index returns of g7 economies conditional value at risk and marginal expected shortfall approaches abstract in this study we examine systemic risk and dependence between oil and stock market indices of g7 economies between january 2003 and november 2017 coincidentally this timeframe covers different distress periods in financial and energy markets we use several time constant time varying and time varying markov copula models to examine the dependence further we use the delta conditional value at risk covar of adrian and brunnermeier 2016 and marginal expected shortfall mes of acharya et al 2012 to captures the risk spillover effects and give evidence of systemic risk from the copula analysis we find dissimilar dependence structure between returns series of oil and the g7 stock markets for france germany and japan the dependence is markov switching time varying while it is time varying for the united states and canada constant for the united kingdom and around zero for italy our empirical evidence on systemic risk indicates that oil price dynamics contributes significantly more to the g7 stock market returns during volatile times than during tranquil times in particular the canada stock market appears more sensitive and vulnerable to negative external shocks emerging from the crude oil market than the other markets further the country risk rankings identified using mes and covar may not be identical in addition the analysis results suggest that the crude oil market can be a good diversifier for investors in japan and france and that the investors in the rest of g7 countries must act more carefully

mass media and public policy abstract if more informed voters receive favorable policies then mass media should influence policy because it provides most of the information people use in voting this paper uses a simple model to analyze the effect of mass media provision of news on a number of policy issues redistribution the size of the government sector rents and corruption the effectiveness of lobby groups and political business cycles it is easy to deal with such a wide range of issues because existing models of political competition often include informed and uniformed voters modelling mass media simply endogenizes who is informed and who is not the paper also discusses empirical evidence and point to areas for future research

patterns of rainfall insurance participation in rural india take up of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural india decreases with basis risk between insurance payouts and income fluctuations increases with household wealth and decreases with binding credit constraints these results are consistent with the predictions of a simple neoclassical model with borrowing constraints other patterns are less consistent with the benchmark model for example participation in village networks and measures of familiarity with the insurance vendor are strongly correlated with insurance take up decisions and risk averse households are less not more likely to purchase insurance these results may reflect household uncertainty about the product given their limited experience with it

political contribution caps and lobby formation theory and evidence abstract the perceived importance of special interest group money in election campaigns motivates widespread use of caps on allowable contributions we present a bargaining model in which the effect of a cap that is not too stringent on the amount a lobby can contribute improves its bargaining position relative to the politician it thus increases the payoff from lobbying which will therefore increase the equilibrium number of lobbies when lobby formation is endogenous caps may then also increase aggregate contributions from lobbies and increase politically motivated government spending we present empirical evidence from u s states that support various predictions of the model we find a positive effect on the number of pacs formed from enacting laws constraining pac contributions moreover the estimated effect is non linear as predicted by the theoretical model very stringent caps reduce the number of pacs but as the cap increases above a threshold level the effect becomes positive contribution caps in the majority of u s states are above this threshold

media markets special interests and voters abstract this paper examines the role of mass media in countering special interest group influence i use the concentration of campaign contributions from political action committees to proxy for special interests capture of us senate candidates from 1980 to 2002 and compare the reaction of voters to increases in concentration in two different types of media markets in state media markets and out of state media markets unlike in state media markets out of state markets focus on neighboring states politics and elections thus if citizens punish political capture increases in concentration of special interest contributions to a particular candidate should reduce his vote share in in state counties relative to the out of state counties where the candidate receives less coverage i find that a one standard deviation increase in concentration of special interest contributions to incumbents reduces their vote share by about 0 5 to 1 5 percentage points in in state counties relative to the out of state counties robustness checks suggest that these results are not driven by omitted senator characteristics or by differences between in state and out of state counties along dimensions other than the media environment

one man one dollar campaign contribution limits equal influence and political communication arguably the most important campaign finance regulations in u s federal elections are limits imposed on individual campaign contributions one of the principal arguments in support of these contribution limits has been that they equalize the influence of individual donors and thereby cause candidates aggregate financial resources to more accurately reflect public support i construct a formal model to evaluate this argument the analysis shows that a necessary condition for it to apply is that a candidate s reliance on large contributions is negatively related to voter preferred characteristics which cannot be credibly revealed through campaign advertisements using data on elections to the house of representatives between 1992 and 2000 i find no evidence that such a relationship exists this result casts doubt on the equalization argument in support of campaign contribution limits

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

relationship between the oil price volatility and sectoral stock markets in oil exporting economies evidence from wavelet nonlinear denoised based quantile and granger causality analysis abstract this paper examines the extent of volatility between oil price and sectoral indices in the gulf cooperation council gcc countries by using quantile regression analysis qra for the return s series and denoised series over the period 2006 2017 four sectors are found to offer diversification opportunities during a high market i e 90th quantile all the sectors are found interdependent of oil price volatility however the bank and insurance sectors are insusceptible to oil price volatility during the 10th 25th and 75th quantiles in addition qra results for wavelet nonlinear denoising with a soft thresholding series indicate that all the sectors are interdependent of oil price volatility but that the aggregate market index transport and telecommunication sectors are insensitive to oil price volatility during the 75th and 90th quantiles this highlights the usefulness of denoising the financial returns series when applying regression tools moreover the contagion and interdependence between the oil price and stock returns sectors are estimated by frequency domain causality

the heterogeneity dependence between crude oil price changes and industry stock market returns in china evidence from a quantile regression approach this paper explores the dependence between real crude oil price changes and chinese real industry stock market returns based on the monthly data from 1994 03 to 2014 06 we address this issue using the quantile regression approach enabling a more detailed investigation of structure and degree of dependence empirical results reveal that the reaction of market returns to crude oil is highly heterogeneous across conditional distribution of industry stock returns furthermore there is evidence that this dependence is positive and exists only in recessions or bearish markets with low expected returns the dependence at low quantiles is not limited to one market but is a common feature across industries additionally dependence also changes since the onset of structural breaks we determine that chinese industry stock and global crude oil markets have contagion in rare situations most cases do not demonstrate contagion

exposing corrupt politicians the effects of brazil s publicly released audits on electoral outcomes author s finan frederico ferraz claudio abstract this paper examines the extent to which access to information enhances political accountability based upon the results of brazil s recent anti corruption program that randomly audits municipal expenditures of federally transferred funds it estimates the effect of the disclosure of local government corruption practices upon the re election success of incumbent mayors in municipal elections comparing municipalities which were randomly audited before the elections with those audited after the analysis shows that the disclosure of audit results had a significant impact on the re election rates of mayors found to be corrupt for a one standard deviation increase in reported corruption the audit policy reduced the incumbent s likelihood of re election by 25 percent this effect is more pronounced in municipalities where radio stations are present and higher levels of corruption are identified these findings highlight the value of information and the role of the media in reducing informational asymmetries in the political process thus enabling voters to not only hold corrupt politicians accountable but also to reward non corrupt politicians

are oil shocks inflationary asymmetric and nonlinear specifications versus changes in regime this paper identifies a structural break in core u s inflation phillips curves such that oil prices contributed substantially before 1981 but since that time pass through has been negligible this characterization is robust to a variety of re specifications and fits the data better than asymmetric and nonlinear oil price alternatives evidence does not support the hypotheses that declining energy intensity or deregulation of energy producing and consuming industries played an important role monetary policy did not itself become less accommodative of oil shocks but may have helped create a regime where inflation is less sensitive to price shocks more generally

radio s impact on public spending if informed voters receive favorable policies then the invention of a new mass medium may affect government policies since it affects who is informed and who is not these ideas are developed in a voting model the model forms the basis for an empirical investigation of a major new deal relief program implemented in the middle of the expansion period of radio the main empirical finding is that u s counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds more funds were allocated to poor counties with high unemployment but controlling for these and other variables the effects of radio are large and highly significant

disentangling the role of the exchange rate in oil related scenarios for the european stock market abstract the literature has been analysing so far the response of the stock market to a distress scenario for oil prices considering prices in domestic currency this assumption implies merging commodity risk and exchange rate risk this article proposes to generate oil related scenario depending on the source of risk the same distress oil related scenario in euros could generate an opposite impact on the european stock market depending on the source of risk results show higher losses for eurostoxx when oil prices in euros experience a downward movement due to a decrease of oil price in us dollars and when oil prices in euros experience an upward movement due to a depreciation of the euro against the us dollar this framework can improve our understanding of how the exchange rate interacts in global markets also it contributes to the design of tailor made international scenarios for stress testing

oil prices and real estate investment trusts reits gradual shift causality and volatility transmission analysis abstract according to literature oil price shocks and volatility can have sector specific impacts in the market while these studies include most asset groups the dynamic relationship between the oil market and real estate investment trusts reits has not been tested this study examines the role of oil price shocks and volatility on six reit categories residential hotel healthcare retail mortgage and warehouse industrial reits for the january 2005 december 2013 period in addition a new causality approach is proposed by augmenting the toda yamamoto method with a fourier approximation this approach is capable of capturing gradual or smooth shifts and does not require a prior knowledge regarding the number dates and form of structural breaks the so called fourier toda yamamoto causality mean spillover test finds uni directional causality running from oil prices to all reits except for the mortgage reits in the latter case the causality is reversed in addition the relatively new and simple causality in variance test shows that there is bi directional volatility transmission between the oil market and all reits our results have important implications for reit managers and investors

the asymmetry of the impact of oil price shocks on economic activities an application of the multivariate threshold model this paper applies the multivariate threshold model to investigate the impacts of an oil price change and its volatility on economic activities changes in industrial production and real stock returns the statistical test on the existence of a threshold effect indicates that a threshold value does exist using monthly data of the us canada and japan during the period from 1970 to 2002 we conclude i the optimal threshold level seems to vary according to how an economy depends on imported oil and the attitude towards adopting energy saving technology ii an oil price change or its volatility has a limited impact on the economies if the change is below the threshold levels iii if the change is above threshold levels it appears that the change in oil price better explains macroeconomic variables than the volatility of the oil price and iv if the change is above threshold levels a change in oil price or its volatility explains the model better than the real interest rate

the political economy of government responsiveness theory and evidence from india the determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens is a key issue in political economy here we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems having a more informed an politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governments to be responsive this suggests that there is a role both for democratic institutions and the mass media in ensuring that the preferences of citizens are reflected in policy the ideas behind the model are tested on panel data from india we show that public food distribution and calamity relief expenditure are greater controlling for shocks where governments face greater electoral accountability and where newspaper circulation is highest

insurance credit and technology adoption field experimental evidence from malawi this brief summarizes the insurance credit and technology adoption field experimental evidence from malawi the farmers were offered loans for the november 2006 planting season does production risk suppress the demand for credit the author implemented a randomized field experiment to ask whether provision of insurance against a major source of production risk induces farmers to take out loans to adopt a new crop technology the study sample was composed of roughly 800 maize and groundnut farmers in malawi where by far the dominant source of production risk is the level of rainfall the author randomly selected half of the farmers to be offered credit to purchase high yielding hybrid maize and groundnut seeds for planting in the november 2006 crop season the other half of farmers were offered a similar credit package but were also required to purchase at actuarially fair rates a weather insurance policy that partially or fully forgave the loan in the event of poor rainfall surprisingly take up was lower by 13 percentage points among farmers offered insurance with the loan take up was 33 0 percent for farmers who were offered the uninsured loan there is suggestive evidence that reduced take up of the insured loan was due to farmers already having implicit insurance from the limited liability clause in the loan contract insured loan take up was positively correlated with farmer education income and wealth which may proxy for the individual s default costs by contrast take up of the uninsured loan was uncorrelated with these farmer characteristics

price of oil and world inflation and recession new evidence shows that the commonly held assumption that the 1973 74 oil price increase directly affected us and world inflation and subsequent recession is consistent with the empirical data an extended lucas varro real income equation applied to the us united kingdom canada france germany italy japan and the netherlands gives mixed results partly because of price control and decontrol programs simulation experiments on the price control variable using us data finds strong effects further studies can be made when consistent international data is available for the 1979 80 period 18 references 4 figures 3 tables dck

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

why is there so little money in u s politics in this paper we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy buying but are rather a form of political participation and consumption we summarize the data on campaign spending and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals not special interests are the main source of campaign contributions moreover we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good dependent upon income and campaign contributions as a percent of gdp have not risen appreciably in over 100 years if anything they have probably fallen we then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators votes finally we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects there is little relationship between money and legislator votes thus the question is not why there is so little money politics but rather why organized interests give at all we conclude by offering potential answers to this question this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

television and voter turnout i use variation across markets in the timing of television s introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout the estimated effect is significantly negative accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s i argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting as evidence for this i show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys i also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off year congressional elections which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television

crude oil and stock markets causal relationships in tails abstract this paper considers the causal relationships between wti and dubai crude oil returns and five stock index returns s p 500 nikkei hang seng shanghai and kospi within the quantile causality framework by using daily data for a period from january 1 1996 to october 12 2012 the quantile causality test is useful for a comprehensive understanding of the causal relationship between two returns the test reveals several noteworthy results first although wti returns are not closely related to asian countries some financial markets such as nikkei and hang seng granger cause wti returns second the significance of causality from one market to another derives only from lower and upper levels of quantiles except for the case of causality from nikkei to wti returns third all stock index returns granger cause dubai crude oil returns over almost all quantile levels except for shanghai returns fourth dubai crude oil returns granger cause all asian stock index returns except for s p 500 returns finally the results indicate asymmetric causality from dubai crude oil returns to shanghai returns and kospi returns to dubai crude oil returns

crude oil and stock markets stability instability and bubbles abstract we analyze the long run relationship between the world price of crude oil and international stock markets over 1971 1 2008 3 using a cointegrated vector error correction model with additional regressors allowing for endogenously identified breaks in the cointegrating and error correction matrices we find evidence for breaks after 1980 5 1988 1 and 1999 9 there is a clear long run relationship between these series for six oecd countries for 1971 1 1980 5 and 1988 2 1999 9 suggesting that stock market indices respond negatively to increases in the oil price in the long run during 1980 6 1988 1 we find relationships that are not statistically significantly different from either zero or from the relationships of the previous period the expected negative long run relationship appears to disintegrate after 1999 9 this finding supports a conjecture of change in the relationship between real oil price and real stock prices in the last decade compared to earlier years which may suggest the presence of several stock market bubbles and or oil price bubbles since the turn of the century

separating bric using islamic stocks and crude oil dynamic conditional correlation and volatility spillover analysis abstract this paper explores the dynamic conditional correlation and volatility linkage between islamic indexes and oil for bric countries correlations between these assets increase during the global financial crisis for india and china but not for brazil and russia the volatility error forecast variance of all five indexes comes from spillover but is much lower compared to volatility spillover between conventional indexes and oil hedging performance of islamic indexes are superior in india and china compared to conventional indexes in emerging markets an optimal minimum variance portfolio without reducing expected return can be achieved by investing in lower weights of bric islamic indexes and oil compared to conventional indexes

news droughts news floods and u s disaster relief this paper studies the influence of mass media on u s government response to approximately 5 000 natural disasters occurring between 1968 and 2002 these disasters took nearly 63 000 lives and affected 125 million people per year we show that u s relief depends on whether the disaster occurs at the same time as other newsworthy events such as the olympic games which are obviously unrelated to need we argue that the only plausible explanation of this is that relief decisions are driven by news coverage of disasters and that the other newsworthy material crowds out this news coverage

media capture in a democracy the role of wealth concentration abstract since objective news coverage is vital to democracy captured media can seriously distort collective decisions the current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from the mass media the media might however secretly collude with interest groups in order to influence the public opinion in the case of voting over the level of a productivity enhancing public bad it is shown that an increase in the concentration of firm ownership makes the occurrence of media bias more likely although media bias is not always welfare worsening conditions for it to raise welfare are restrictive

are campaign contributions a form of speech evidence from recent us house elections this paper investigates the effects of the sources ofcandidates campaign funding on their electoral outcomes withparticular emphasis on whether candidates who rely on a narrowbase of funding suffer adverse electoral consequences anextensive dataset consisting of over 650 000 contributions tohouse candidates in elections from 1980 to 1992 is used theresults reveal a negative relationship between theconcentration of contributions and voteshare for open seatcandidates and challengers this finding appears to havesignificant implications for some of the empirical premisesunderlying the u s supreme court s landmark buckley v valeo decision at the very least it represents an importantstylized fact about us elections that is robust over 1980 1992 period

oil price shocks stock market economic activity and employment in greece abstract using a multivariate vector autoregression var approach this paper attempts to shed light into the dynamic relationship among oil prices real stock prices interest rates real economic activity and employment for greece the empirical evidence suggests that oil price changes affect real economic activity and employment oil prices are important in explaining stock price movements stock returns do not lead to changes in real activity and employment

oil shocks and stock volatility new evidence via a bayesian graph based var approach abstractthis article examines the temporal dependence between three oil shocks and realized volatility in the stock markets of g20 countries between 1994 and 2019 by applying a novel graphical b

electoral competition and special interest politics have fixed positions on some issues but vary their positions on others in order to attract votes and campaign contributions in this context we examine whether special interest groups are governed by an electoral motive or an influence in their campaign giving and how their contributions affect the equilibrium platforms we show that each party is induced to behave as if it were maximizing a weighted sum of the aggregate welfares of informed voters and members of special interest groups the party that is expected to win a majority of seats caters more to the special interests

inequality and media capture abstract popular support of redistributive policies depends on information they have about the tax system and efficiency of public projects mass media provides a convenient means for manipulating public opinion even when voters understand that the media can be biased i develop a theory of media capture in which the rich can influence information published in a media outlet at a cost the model shows that higher inequality is associated with lower media freedom this effect is stronger in democratic regimes i find empirical support for the model in both panel data and cross country analysis

concept and unintended consequences of weather index insurance the case of mexico recently weather index insurance wii has received considerable attention as a tool to insure farmers against weather related risks particularly in developing countries donor organizations local governments insurance companies development economists as well as agricultural economists are discussing the costs and benefits of wii while the literature on wii has mainly focused on many cases in africa and asia in this article we analyze the wii program in mexico which is one of the largest wii programs worldwide in this context we discuss potentially important spill over effects on related markets which so far have not been considered in the academic literature first we argue that wii creates disincentives to invest in other non insured crops leading to potential overspecialization and monoculture secondly wii generates disincentives to invest in irrigation systems because farmers are insured only as long as production takes place on non irrigated land third in case of catastrophic events food prices can potentially inflate with indemnity payments at the expense of the uninsured poor we also suggest that in mexico the thresholds of the weather index be continuously re calibrated in order to adjust for the development of drought resistant seeds finally the index could relatively easily be extended to account for precipitation variances we argue that these factors and spillover effects should be accounted for in cost benefit analysis of wii this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

rational choice theory and the paradox of not voting at least since downs s 1957 seminal work an economic theory of democracy rational choice theorists have appreciated the paradox of not voting in a large election the probability that an individual vote might change the election outcome is vanishingly small if each person only votes for the purpose of influencing the election outcome then even a small cost to vote like a minor schedule conflict or mildly bad weather should dissuade anyone from voting yet it seems that many people will put up with long lines daunting registration requirements and even the threat of physical violence or arrest in order to vote given the central place of voting within political economy the lack of an adequate rational choice model of large elections with costly voting presents an obvious problem for the most part theorists have bypassed the turnout problem either by eliminating voters as strategic actors or by assuming that the decision to vote is independent of other strategic choices the problem with the first approach is that the empirical literature on voting behavior provides considerable evidence of apparently strategic behavior in primary elections there is evidence that voters condition their vote choice on the viability of candidates abramson aldrich paolino and rohde 1992 in a seminal and comprehensive study cox 1997 shows that voting patterns and election outcomes are broadly consistent with patterns of behavior predicted by strategic voting models for example under plurality rule in which the candidate with the most votes wins the election

a free press is bad news for corruption abstract this paper tests the proposition that a free press may be a powerful control on corruption we find evidence of a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross section of countries this result is robust to specification and sample and the relationship is not sensitive to the choice of a particular measure of corruption or of press freedom furthermore we present evidence which suggests that the direction of causation runs from higher press freedom to lower corruption

economic behavior under uncertainty a joint analysis of risk preferences and technology a method is developed to estimate jointly risk preferences and technology under general conditions the approach is illustrated in an application to the analysis of u s corn soybean acreage decisions over time the results provide useful information on the nature of farmers risk preferences and on the influence of price risk and production risk on acreage allocation and farmers welfare copyright 1996 by mit press

weather index drought insurance an ex ante evaluation for millet growers in niger in the sudano sahelian region which includes south niger the inter annual variability of the rainy season is high and irrigation is limited as a consequence bad rainy seasons have a massive impact on crop yield and regularly result in food crises traditional insurance policies based on crop damage assessment are not available because of asymmetric information and high transaction costs compared to the value of production we assess the risk mitigation capacity of an alternative form of insurance which has been implemented at a large scale in india since 2003 insurance based on a weather index we compare the efficiency of various weather indices to increase the expected utility of a representative risk averse farmer we show the importance of using plot level yield data rather than village averages which bias results due to the presence of idiosyncratic shocks we also illustrate the need for out of sample estimations in order to avoid overfitting even with the appropriate index and assuming substantial risk aversion we find a limited gain of implementing insurance which roughly corresponds to or slightly exceeds the cost observed in india for implementing such insurance policies however when we separately treat the plots with and without fertilisers separately we see that the benefit of insurance is slightly higher in the former case this suggests that insurance policies may slightly increase the use of risk increasing inputs such as fertilisers and improved cultivars and hence improve average yields which remain very low in the region

the effect of oil prices on stock prices fresh evidence from asymmetric causality tests abstractthis article investigates the causal impact of oil prices on stock prices in each g7 market as well as in the world market an asymmetric causality test developed by hatemi j is used for this purpose since the underlying data appears to be non normal with time varying volatility we use bootstrap simulations with leverage adjustments in order to produce more reliable critical values than the asymptotic ones based on symmetric causality tests we find no causal effect of oil prices on the stock prices of the world market or any of the g7 countries however when we apply an asymmetric causality test we find that increasing oil prices cause stock prices to rise in the world the u s and japan while decreasing oil prices cause stock prices to fall in germany this may imply that the world the u s and japanese stock markets consider increases in oil prices as an indicator of good news as this may mean that there is an increase in oil demand due to an expected growth in the economy while the germ

mass media competition political competition and public policy if better informed voters receive favourable policies then mass media will affect policy because mass media provide most of the information people use in voting this paper models the incentives of the media to deliver news to different groups the increasing returns to scale technology and advertising financing of media firms induce them to provide more news to large groups such as taxpayers and dispersed consumer interests and groups that are valuable to advertisers this news bias alters the tradeoff in political competition and therefore introduces a bias in public policy the paper also discusses the effects of broadcast media replacing newspapers as the main information source about politics the model predicts that this change should raise spending on government programmes used by poor and rural voters

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association

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

oil price movements and stock markets revisited a case of sector stock price indexes in the g 7 countries abstract applying sector stock prices and oil prices in 1991 01 2009 05 from the g7 countries we find oil price shocks do not significantly impact the composite index in each country however stock price changes in germany the uk and the us were found to lead oil price changes as for the interaction between oil price changes and sector stock price changes we find short run negative causal relationships 4 of 7 sector index returns were impacted by oil price changes in germany 2 in the us and 1 in france in particular stock returns of information technology and consumer staples sectors were found to be impacted most by oil price shocks followed by financial utilities and transportation sectors in terms of causality from sector stock price changes to oil price changes we find stock price changes lead oil price changes in 8 of 9 sectors in germany most in the g7 countries followed by the uk italy france canada and the us no such a causal relationship however is found for japan with respect to specific sectors stock price changes in consumer staples and materials sectors were impacted most significantly by oil price changes followed by transportation financial energy health care industrials utilities information technology and telecommunication sectors with the exception of consumer discretionary sector in addition short term stock price changes are found to lead positively oil price changes

electoral competition with informed and uninformed voters i present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies informed voters however vote based on those policies so candidates face a trade off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies particularistic and collective in the case of particularistic policies the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion the model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages for the case of collective policies the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters and contributions are zero

safety nets and index based insurance historical assessment and semiparametric simulation for northern ghana abstract this article considers index based safety nets aimed at assuring participants a minimum income at the village level set by a prespecified poverty line the participating villages collectively manage a pooled budget offering an index based per capita indemnity to the villages financed from a uniform per hectare premium possibly supplemented by an external subsidy the scheme involves implicit cross subsidies in favor of the poorest villages otherwise it focuses on covariate risk leaving it to mutual arrangements to deal with intravillage idiosyncratic risk its design is obtained from a risk minimizing model for the collective of villages with constraints of two kinds the first is the budget that ensures that payments receive adequate finances the second concerns the set of admissible schedules requiring that payments are triggered by a flexible function of only a few variables for this we propose a semiparametric form from kernel learning noting its capacity to combine a priori on the i

the impact of federal spending on house election outcomes while it is widely believed by academics politicians and the popular press that incumbent members of congress are rewarded by the electorate for bringing federal dollars to their district the empirical evidence supporting that claim is extremely weak one explanation for the failure to uncover the expected relationship between federal spending and election outcomes is that incumbents who expect to have difficulty being reelected are likely to exert greater effort in obtaining federal outlays since it is generally impossible to adequately measure this effort the estimated impact of spending is biased downward because of an omitted variable bias we address this estimation problem using instrumental variables for each house district we use spending outside the district but inside the state containing the district as an instrument for spending in the district federal spending is affected by a large number of actors e g governors senators mayors and other house members in the state delegation