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

quantile dependence of oil price movements and stock returns we examine the impact of quantile and interquantile oil price movements on different stock return quantiles by testing the hypothesis of equality in conditional and unconditional quantile distribution functions of stock returns we capture quantile dependence under different stock market conditions while taking into account different kinds of oil price movements by computing unconditional and conditional stock return quantiles through marginal models for stock returns and copula functions for oil stock dependence analyzing stock return data for three developed economies the us the uk and the european monetary union and the five brics countries brazil russia india china and south africa for 2000 to 2014 our results indicate that 1 the impact of extreme upward and downward oil price changes on upper and lower stock price quantiles was much smaller before compared to after crisis onset 2 the downside spillover effects were larger than the upside spillover effects for most countries before crisis onset and for all countries after crisis onset and 3 small positive and negative oil price movements had no impact on any stock return quantiles neither before nor after crisis onset

estimates of consumer loss due to monopoly in the u s food manufacturing industries comment due to monopoly in the u s food manufacturing industries in 1975 was at least 10 billion but possibly as high as 15 billion p 637 the authors suggest that their findings provide justification for expanding the budgets of u s antitrust agencies and for restructuring the industry parker and connor pc have provided only part of the information required to draw these conclusions therefore the results of their study do not provide justification for either expanding the antitrust agencies or restructuring the u s foodprocessing industry indeed it is quite possible that restructuring the industry toward a more atomistic structure would be contrary to the public interest the relevant question is not how much monopoly profit exists in the food processing industry rather the relevant questions are a does an alternative industry structure exist that will provide more net consumer welfare with no increase in resource use and b how can the change to the preferred structure be accomplished and what will be the cost parker and connor have not answered these questions the monopoly overcharge rectangle as defined by pc is illustrated in figure 1 assuming a linear demand curve dd and constant average cost curves ca represents the cost curve if the industry has an atomistic structure parker and connor postulate that the costs of firms in the oligopolistically structured industry c1 are above the costs that would exist in an atomistically structured industry the monopoly price p thus extracts monopoly overcharges of piafca from customers just how much of the overcharge rectangle piafca is an income gain to the monopolistic depends on how much higher the monopolist s average costs c are compared to the competitive level ca parker and connor p 628 what evidence do we have that the monopolists costs are higher than the costs of more atomistically sized firms changes in the number and size of firms in the industry over the past twenty five years strongly indicate that the costs of these larger firms are lower than the costs of the firms they replaced how could higher cost firms have replaced lowercost firms the current structure could have

does crude oil price play an important role in explaining stock return behavior abstract employing the ms arji gjr garch x model in which the parameters for the jump process the asymmetric garch effect and the impacts of oil price shocks are regime dependent this paper analyzes the impact of crude oil price shock on stock return dynamics empirical results reveal three interesting findings first incorporating the asymmetric garch effect and the oil price shock can substantially improve fitting ability second the garch and jump components show very different behaviors during turbulent and stable periods third the effects of current and past oil price shocks differ the conditional mean mean of jump size and variance of jump size immediately respond to a current oil price shock a one period lagged oil price shock no matter whether positive or negative can affect the transition probability that the stock market will remain conditional in the next period moreover the effects of lagged positive and negative shocks on transition probabilities are very different

measuring contagion between energy market and stock market during financial crisis a copula approach abstract in this paper we apply time varying copulas to investigate whether a contagion effect existed between energy and stock markets during the recent financial crisis using the wti oil spot price the s p500 index the shanghai stock market composite index and the shenzhen stock market component index returns evidence was found for a significantly increasing dependence between crude oil and stock markets after the failure of lehman brothers thus supporting the existence of contagion in the sense of forbes and rigobon s 2002 definition moreover increased tail dependence and symmetry characterize all the paired markets this indicates that significant increases in tail dependence are an actual dimension of the contagion phenomenon and that crude oil and stock prices are linked to the same degree regardless of whether markets are booming or crashing during the sample period finally the contagion effect is found to be much weaker for china than the us the empirical results have potentially important implications for risk management

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

a comparison of petroleum futures versus spot prices as predictors of prices in the future abstract even though studies have indicated that the futures market leads the spot market in price discovery this paper hypothesizes that the predictive significance of each should be the same a number of different statistical tests are presented to test this hypothesis when deseasonalized data is employed the predictive significance of each series is found to be the same but when actual prices are employed futures prices did correctly anticipate the observed seasonal pattern

regime switching in the reactions of stock markets in saudi arabia to oil price variations the study revisits the stock oil nexus by examining the reactions of equity markets to oil price shocks at national and sectoral levels for saudi arabia in a time varying framework by employing the markov switching egarch model developed by henry 2009 journal of banking and finance 33 405 based on weekly data the findings reveal that the behaviour of all stock markets switches between an expansion regime and a recession regime with more persistence for the expansion state additionally influential international events associated with stock market drops are clearly identified in the recession regime furthermore there is evidence of asymmetric reactions of the equity index returns and the probabilities of transition from one state to another to oil price variations with heterogeneous impacts across sectors and regimes the stock markets are more sensitive to oil price decreases than to oil price increases although the evidence of relatively slight differences in some findings across weekdays the study allows investors and policymakers to understand well the interactions of stock sector markets vis a vis the world oil market in a regime switching framework in order to make the right decision as regards portfolio diversification and regulation of the stock markets

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

oil shocks and oil stocks evidence from the 1970s the present paper examines the returns to 29 oil companies listed on the new york stock exchange during the period surrounding the oil shock of 1973 the returns are decomposed into production refining foreign and domestic operations the hypothesis that domestic price controls benefitted refiners is tested finally the hypothesis that oil price risk was priced in the sense of the arbitrage pricing theory is tested

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

macro economy stock market and oil prices do meaningful relationships exist among their cyclical fluctuations this paper examines the relationship among consumer price index industrial production stock market and oil prices in greece initially we use a unified statistical framework cointegration and vecm to study the data in levels we then employ a multivariate var model to examine the relationship among the cyclical components of our series the period of the study is from 1996 1 to 2008 6 findings suggest that oil prices and the stock market exercise a positive effect on the greek cpi in the long run cyclical components analysis suggests that oil prices exercise significant negative influence to the stock market in addition oil prices are negatively influencing cpi at a significant level however we find no effect of oil prices on industrial production and cpi finally no relationship can be documented between the industrial production and stock market for the greek market the findings of this study are of particular interest and importance to policy makers financial managers financial analysts and investors dealing with the greek economy and the greek stock market

wavelet dynamics for oil stock world interactions abstract a previous research ignores the distinction between short term and long term and by decomposing financial variables world general and stock market indexes and the macroeconomic variable oil prices at various time scales we study the relationship among series on a daily scale by scale basis continuous time wavelets help to circumvent the problems associated to basic linear regressions and given that stock oil relationships are usually described as complicated we extend previous findings by providing more generalized and convincing results in analyzing contagion and interdependence issues as well as lead and lag effects for both world general and sector stock levels between december 1992 and october 2012 the relationship between oil prices and sector stock returns is ambiguous because results seem to show that there are both phase and anti phase relationships where mostly it is oil that is the lagging variable independently of the sector under analysis there is higher coherence among series for higher scales thus supporting the interdependence hypothesis showing that long run market dynamics are more uncertain empirical results indicate a bidirectional relationship between both series for large time horizons which can be associated to fundamentalist traders especially fund managers and institutional investors and which depend on the historical period under analysis

cross national price differences for pharmaceuticals how large and why bilateral drug price and quantity indexes based on comprehensive data for seven countries us canada france germany italy japan and the uk refute the conventional wisdom that us drug prices are much higher than elsewhere for laspeyres us weighted indexes previous drug price comparisons are biased by unrepresentative samples and unweighted indexes quasi hedonic regression shows that cross national price differences reflect differences in product characteristics and in their implicit prices which reflect the regulatory regime strict price regulation systematically lowers prices for older molecules and globally diffused molecules generic competition lowers prices in less regulated regimes which also have more price elastic demand

prescription drug expenditures in the united states the effects of obesity demographics and new pharmaceutical products author affiliation donald vandegrift professor of economics the college of new jersey 2000 pennington rd ewing nj 08628 usa vandedon tcnj eduanusua datta associate professor of economics school of business administration philadelphia university school house lane and henry avenue philadelphia pa 19144 usa dattaa philau edu corresponding author acknowledgment we wish to thank subarna samanta judith shinogle and karen conway for helpful discussions and comments julie l hotchkiss provided us with valuable suggestions for an earlier version of this article and we benefited from advice given by two anonymous referees at this journal ellie fogarty ravi kaneriya michael ferlise and leigh ann culbertson provided valuable research assistance 1 introductionduring the period 1990 1998 real per capita expenditures on prescription drugs in the u s increased by 84 1996 dollars gdp deflator beginning in 1993 the average annual percentage increase in prescription drug spending exceeded the overall percentage increase in national health expenditures by 1998 the annual percentage growth in prescription drug spending was more than 16 while overall spending on health care rose less than 6 compared to the previous year in total u s consumers spent more than 90 billion on prescription drugs in 1998 or 334 on a per capita basis centers for medicare and medicaid services 2002 not surprisingly prescription drug coverage and its associated costs have become issues in national as well as state political campaigns 1but the rising expenditures were not simply caused by higher prescription drug prices while the cpi consumer price index for prescription drugs rose by 42 nominal per capita expenditures on prescription drugs rose 120 during the period u s bureau of the census 2002 consequently higher rates of prescription drug consumption explain at least part of the story further while overall prescription drug spending has increased rapidly per capita prescription drug use in the united states varies widely by state in 1998 some states had per capita prescription drug spending of more than 400 while other states residents spent half that much while we do not wish to absolve the pharmaceutical manufacturers this data suggests that arguments placing the blame for high prescription drug costs on the prices and profits of pharmaceutical manufacturers may be missing a portion of the story the literature on prescription drugs suggests a number of causes e g new drug introductions aging of the population insurance coverage however berndt 2002 notes that a shortcoming of the existing literature is the lack of quantitative estimates of the causes for increased consumption of prescription drugs since the mid 1990s in a similar vein kane 1997 concludes that the effect of the managed care revolution has been difficult to separate out from the other forces affecting pharmaceuticals to better inform public policy we provide some quantitative estimates of the factors that have contributed to the increase in prescription drug expenditures we investigate the role of public health factors obesity smoking and alcohol consumption rates aging population 65 and over access to medical care managed care enrollments and the relative size of the uninsured population new pharmaceutical products income and unemployment on real prescription drug expenditures using panel data from all 50 u s states for the period 1990 1998 the estimates should allow better projections of the anticipated increase in prescription drug expenditures gauging the costs of smoking obesity and alcohol consumption is also important high costs associated with any of these public health problems make it easier to justify costly government programs to reduce their prevalence thus public policy responses to rising prescription drug expenditures will vary based on the source of the increase

time varying effect of oil market shocks on the stock market abstract a mixture innovation time varying parameter var model is used to examine the impact of structural oil price shocks on u s stock market return time variation is evident in both the coefficients and the variance covariance matrix the standard deviations of the demand side structural shocks reached forty year peaks during the global financial crisis and have remained high since in the real stock return equation the coefficient of global real economic activity has declined since the late 1990s and that of oil market specific demand oil shock has been lower since the early 1990s than before the structural oil shocks account for 25 7 of the long run variation in real stock returns overall with substantial change in levels and sources of contribution over time the contribution of shocks to global real economic activity to real stock return variation rose sharply to 22 in 2009 and remains 17 over 2009 2012 the contribution of oil market specific demand price shocks rose unevenly from 5 in the mid 1970s to about 15 in 2007 with a subsequent decline the contribution of oil supply shocks has trended downward from 17 to 5 over 1973 2012

competition in off patent drug markets issues regulation and evidence in recent years health insurers have placed a great deal of emphasis on the ability of generic medicines to deliver significant savings to overstretched health care budgets due to their lower cost and potential for a more efficient resource allocation in this paper we study market developments after patent expiry whether health insurance captures the financial benefits from cheaper generics and whether regulation and product differentiation among others have any power in explaining originator and generic price movements generic entry and diffusion we find that health insurance does not capitalize fully or fast enough on the cost advantage of generic medicines either because generic policies do not encourage their fast uptake or because generic drug prices are high and frequently tied directly or indirectly to originator drug prices we also find that reference pricing a particular form of reimbursement regulation encourages generic entry and reduces generic prices but only marginally finally in generic markets characterized by homogeneous products we find evidence of product differentiation which is impacting prices upwards rather than downwards if health insurance is to benefit fully from generic medicines it ought to encourage faster uptake and price competition and discourage price fixing regulation that ties generic prices to those of originator brands panos kanavos joan costa font and elizabeth seeley

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

crude oil and the macroeconomy tests of some popular notions a note perhaps no other economic events in the post world war ii era have generated as much attention as the series of crude oil price shocks that have jolted the world economy since the opec boycott of 1973 a tremendous amount of space in the popular and professional literature has been devoted to analyzing the impacts of these shocks on the developed economies and the adjustments these shocks have induced one residual of this literature has been a general impression that since 1973 the functional relationship between crude oil prices and the developed macroeconomies has been dramatically and fundamentally altered yet to our knowledge no one has formally tested this impression recent evidence of hamilton 1983 suggests that crude oil prices had a strong impact on the u s business cycle well before 1973 further while textbook treatments of oil price shocks tend to highlight cost push inflationary effects the research of berndt and wood 1975 1979 and wilcox 1983 indicates the net complementarity between energy and capital in the u s economy is quite strong both before and after 1973 thus oil price shocks may have stronger real effects than generally believed in this paper we formally test three popular notions associated with the so called

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

forecasting the conditional volatility of oil spot and futures prices with structural breaks and long memory models this paper extends previous studies by investigating the relevance of structural breaks and long memory in modeling and forecasting the conditional volatility of oil spot and futures prices using a variety of garch type models our results can be summarized as follows first we provide evidence of parameter instability in five out of nine garch based conditional volatility processes for energy prices second long memory is effectively present in all the series considered and a figarch model seems to better fit the data but the degree of volatility persistence diminishes significantly after adjusting for structural breaks finally the out of sample analysis shows that volatility models accommodating instability and long memory characteristics of the data provide the best volatility forecasts for most cases

the dynamic effects of oil supply shocks on the us stock market returns of upstream oil and gas companies abstract a time varying parameter var model is used to examine the impact of structural oil supply shocks on the us real stock market return of oil and gas exploration and production companies the result shows that the impact response of the real return of the upstream stocks to a negative world non us oil supply shock increases substantially over recent years from an average value of 0 70 in 2006 to 6 16 during 2008 2010 with a spike of 6 81 in 2014q3 the endogenous effects of us oil supply shocks on the return play an important role in that the responses of the stock returns to a negative us oil supply shock are positive and persistent with an average value of 3 60 over time the time varying effects of oil supply shocks are heterogeneous the magnitudes of return responses are different among independents large proved reserve independents and integrated companies over time

strategic pricing of new pharmaceuticals this paper provides empirical evidence on the leading factors affecting the prices of new pharmaceuticals both at introduction and after 4 6 and 8 years most important is the extent of therapeutic advance embodied in a new product for drugs which represent important therapeutic gains launch prices can be two or three times those of existing drugs used for the same purposes while drugs that largely duplicate the actions of currently available products are typically priced at comparable levels in addition the number of branded substitutes has a substantial negative effect on launch prices which reflects the importance of competitive pressures duplicate products thereby play an important economic role in pharmaceutical markets

the industrial organization of health care markets the u s health care sector is large and growing health care spending in 2011 amounted to 2 7 trillion and 18 percent of gdp approximately half of health care output is allocated via markets in this paper we analyze the industrial organization literature on health care markets focusing on the impact of competition on price quality and treatment decisions for health care providers and health insurers we conclude with a discussion of research opportunities for industrial organization economists including opportunities created by the u s patient protection and affordable care act

welfare implications of oligopoly in u s food manufacturing a statistical procedure is used to show that increased concentration in u s food manufacturing industries is associated with increased total input productivity a price leadership model is employed in order to estimate total welfare loss if an elasticity of 1 is assumed deadweight loss to society is estimated at 0 5 of food value if an elasticity of 0 5 is assumed total loss to consumers amounts to 6 11 of food value which is 10 billion in 1975 the increase in total factor productivity which is linked to concentration is roughly sufficient to offset the entire loss to consumers

oil price fluctuations and u s dollar exchange rates adding oil prices to the monetary model of exchange rates we find that oil prices significantly explain movements in the value of the u s dollar usd against major currencies from the 1970s to 2008 our long run and forecasting results are remarkably consistent with an oil exchange rate relationship increases in real oil prices lead to a significant depreciation of the usd against net oil exporter currencies such as canada mexico and russia on the other hand the currencies of oil importers such as japan depreciate relative to the usd when the real oil price goes up

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

energy price shocks household location patterns and housing crises theory and implications abstract the u s housing collapse in 2007 is widely blamed for inducing a financial crisis that spread to the real economy and caused a severe and prolonged downturn this paper develops a model to investigate the role of gasoline price shocks in triggering the housing market collapse and identifies a new channel through which energy price shocks affect the financial market and the macro economy results suggest that unanticipated gasoline price shocks increase the cost of work commutes lower the value of homes away from the city center and increase foreclosure rates as homeowners either cannot afford mortgage payments amid elevated gas expenditures or seek to abandon underwater homes the model predicts that gasoline price shocks disproportionately affect suburban households that face greater exposure due to longer commutes and lower incomes empirical evidence from the 2007 08 housing collapse is presented to corroborate this theory

price discovery in oil markets a time varying analysis of the 1990 1991 gulf conflict abstract this study examines the behaviour of crude oil spot and futures markets in the uk and usa during the 1990 1991 gulf conflict the objective is to investigate the relative ability of spot and futures markets to impound information this is achieved with the use of a generalized model of price discovery which represents a synthesis of the two most commonly used methodologies in its field emphasis is placed on the time varying nature of price discovery relationships results indicate that such relationships are strongly temporal these findings offer new insights into the nature of relationships between spot and futures markets

generic entry price competition and market segmentation in the prescription drug market abstract this paper studies the effects of generic entry on post patent price competition for 18 prescription drugs recently exposed to competition an independent validating test of the generic competition paradox is conducted using a newly created data set each generic entrant is associated with an average 1 increase in the branded price the one way error component model accounts for intermolecular competition market segmentation and endogeneity of entry and finds branded prices increasing by 2 alternative definitions of entry suggest that price competition is confined to the generic market the unique payer type feature of the data offers empirical evidence supporting market segmentation

unbiasedness and time varying risk premia in the crude oil futures market abstract this paper presents some empirical evidence on market efficiency and unbiasedness in the crude oil futures market and some related issues on the basis of monthly observations on spot and futures prices of the west texas intermediate wti crude oil several tests are carried out on the relevant hypotheses the evidence suggests that futures prices are neither unbiased nor efficient forecasters of spot prices furthermore a garch m 1 1 model reveals the existence of a time varying risk premium

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

the influence of managed care on generic prescribing rates an analysis of hmo physicians retail expenditures on prescription drugs continue to grow annually by double digits while the share of prescriptions dispensed as generics remains relatively constant efforts to curtail rising drug expenditures have been exhibited by managed care organizations mcos yet drug expenditures continue to rise using the national ambulatory medical care survey namcs for 1997 2000 this study examines how managed care specifically health maintenance organizations hmos influence the physician s decision to prescribe the generic version of a multi source drug the findings show that hmo physicians are not significantly more likely to prescribe generic drugs than non hmo physicians among hmo physicians different cost reduction tools effect generic prescribing behaviour in different ways with the size of the effect depending on the patient and physician relationship with the hmo

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

regulation and competition in the taiwanese pharmaceutical market under national health insurance this article investigates the determinants of the prices of pharmaceuticals and their impact on the demand for prescription drugs in the context of taiwan s pharmaceutical market where medical providers earn profit directly from prescribing and dispensing drugs based on product level data we find evidence that the profit seeking behavior of the medical providers in the prescription drug market transfers the force of competition from the unregulated wholesale market to the regulated retail market and hence market competition still plays an important role in the determination of the regulated price we also find that the profit seeking behavior plays a similar role to advertising in that it increases the brand loyalty and hence lowers price elasticity an important implication of our study is that the institutional features in the pharmaceutical market matter in shaping the nature of pharmaceutical competition and the responsiveness of pharmaceutical consumption with respect to changes in price

do higher oil prices push the stock market into bear territory this paper investigates whether a higher oil price pushes the stock market into bear territory by using time varying transition probability markov switching models it examines different measures of oil price shocks empirical evidence from monthly returns on the standard poor s s p 500 price index suggests that an increase in oil prices leads to a higher probability of a bear market emerging

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

can environmental sustainability be used to manage energy price risk energy security issues and climate change are two of the most pressing problems facing society and both of these problems are likely to increase energy price variability in the coming years this paper develops and estimates a model of a company s energy price exposure and presents evidence showing that increases in a company s environmental sustainability lowers its energy price exposure this result is robust across two different measures of energy prices these results should be useful to companies seeking new ways of addressing energy price risk as well as governments concerned about the impact that energy price risk can have on economic growth and prosperity

oil and the macroeconomy when prices go up and down an extension of hamilton s results in an important paper hamilton 1983 demonstrated a strong correlation between oil price changes and gross national product growth in u s data however his study pertained to a period in which all the large oil price movements were upward and thus it left unanswered the question whether the correlation persists in periods of price decline moreover the price variable he used was somewhat distorted by price controls in the 1970s this note investigates whether hamilton s results continue to hold when the sample is extended to include the recent oil market collapse and the oil price variable is corrected for the effects of price controls particular attention is given to the possibility of asymmetric responses to oil price increases and decreases as suggested in the structural employment literature loungani 1986 davis 1987 hamilton 1988 like hamilton i based my investigation on the gnp equation in sims s 1 980b six variable quarterly vector autoregressive model

pharmaceuticals in u s health care determinants of quantity and price the u s pharmaceutical industry has again become the focus of considerable controversy in understanding the economics underlying this industry distinctions between short medium and long run costs are critical as is that between economic and accounting costs consumers heterogeneous valuations create strong incentives for non uniform pricing and targeted marketing the conflict between static efficiency price new drugs low near short run marginal cost and dynamic efficiency price new drugs high maintain incentives for innovation is deep and enduring this trade off is becoming more severe as the relative costs of bringing new drugs to market have increased sharply

volatility spillovers and cross hedging between gold oil and equities evidence from the gulf cooperation council countries the paper examines the return and volatility spillovers between crude oil gold and equities and investigates the usefulness of the two commodities in hedging equity portfolios using daily data from january 20043 to may 2016 for the gulf cooperation council countries a dcc garch model is used to estimate dynamic correlations and hedge ratios we find significant spillovers from oil to equities highlighting the heavy dependence of the local economies on oil moreover the spillovers of gold on the stock markets are insignificant suggesting that gold price fluctuations do not necessarily influence equity investment decisions in the opposite direction we find that equities do not exert significant influence on the two commodities which we attribute to the relatively small capitalisation of the exchanges our results reveal low dynamic correlations and hedge ratios with a few spikes during crises indicating that oil and gold are cheap hedges for stocks albeit not good ones while they could be considered as weak safe havens but at a considerable cost

are benefits from oil stocks diversification gone new evidence from a dynamic copula and high frequency data abstract oil is perceived as a good diversification tool for stock markets to fully understand this potential we propose a new empirical methodology that combines generalized autoregressive score copula functions with high frequency data and allows us to capture and forecast the conditional time varying joint distribution of the oil stocks pair accurately our realized garch with time varying copula yields statistically better forecasts of the dependence and quantiles of the distribution relative to competing models employing a recently proposed conditional diversification benefits measure that considers higher order moments and nonlinear dependence from tail events we document decreasing benefits from diversification over the past ten years the diversification benefits implied by our empirical model are moreover strongly varied over time these findings have important implications for asset allocation as the benefits of including oil in stock portfolios may not be as large as perceived

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

the causal nexus between oil prices and equity market in the u s a regime switching model abstract the aim of this paper is to analyse the causal link between monthly oil futures price changes and a sub grouping of s p 500 stock index changes the causal linkage between oil and stock markets is modelled using a vector autoregressive model with time varying parameters so as to reflect changes in granger causality over time a markov switching vector autoregressive ms var model in which causal link between the series is stochastic and governed by an unobservable markov chain is used for inferring time varying causality although we do not find any lead lag type granger causality the results based on the ms var model clearly show that oil futures price has strong regime prediction power for a sub grouping of s p 500 stock index during various sub periods in the sample while there is a weak evidence for the regime prediction power of a sub grouping of s p 500 stock indexes the regime prediction non causality tests on the ms var model show that both variables are useful for making inference about the regime process and that the evidence on regime prediction causality is primarily found in the equation describing a sub grouping of s p 500 stock market returns the evidence from the conditional non causality tests shows that past information on the other series fails to improve the one step ahead prediction for both oil futures and stock returns

interdependence of oil prices and stock market indices a copula approach article i nfo article history in this paper we study the relationship between the oil price and stock market index of various countries between 1982 and 2007 we exclude oil and gas stock companies from the stock indices to remove the obvious direct linkage oil price series are converted into local currency to account for possible exchange rate effects the method of copula is used to model the general dependence between stock returns and oil price returns our findings suggest a weak dependence between oil prices and stock indices for most cases which are consistent with the results from previous studies exceptions are for the stock index returns of large oil consuming and producing countries united states and canada which are shown to have a relatively strong dependence with the oil price series the introduction of euro in 1999 altered considerably dependence between oil prices and stock returns

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

energy price uncertainty energy intensity and firm investment this paper examines the effect of energy price uncertainty on firm level investment an error correction model of capital stock adjustment is estimated with data on u s manufacturing firms higher energy price uncertainty is found to make firms more cautious by reducing the responsiveness of investment to sales growth the result is robust to consideration of energy intensity by industry the effect is greater for high growth firms it must be emphasized that the direct effect of uncertainty is not estimated conditional variance of energy price is obtained from a garch model findings suggest that stability in energy prices would be conducive to greater stability in firm level investment

oil price shocks and transportation firm asset prices abstract the transportation sector is a major user of oil based energy even as oil prices continue to fluctuate greatly the impact of oil price changes on transportation firms has heretofore not been adequately examined this paper fills this gap documenting important new findings based on analysis of over two decades of daily data on large changes in oil prices oil price shocks first while transportation firm returns are influenced negatively by oil price increases risks are increased more by oil price declines second firm characteristics are important with the market to book ratio being the most important firm characteristic and roa firm size and the prior run up in prices are also important in influencing oil price related returns betas variances and trading volumes third in the s p transportation sub sector industry concentration is negatively related to returns oil price risk and trading volume and asymmetrically related to returns and market betas these new findings enhance our understanding of the asset price impact of oil price shocks and should be of much interest to scholars corporate executives money managers regulators and policy makers