education poverty and terrorism is there a causal connection the paper investigates whether there is a connection between poverty or low education and terrorism we review evidence on hate crimes which are closely related to terrorism the occurrence of hate crimes is largely independent of economic conditions we analyze data on support for attacks against israeli targets from public opinion polls conducted in the west bank and gaza strip support for violent attacks does not decrease among those with higher education and higher living standards the core contribution of the paper is a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in hezbollah militant activities having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary or higher education is positively associated with participation in hezbollah we also find that israeli jewish settlers who attacked palestinians in the west bank in the early 1980s were overwhelmingly from high paying occupations although our results are tentative and exploratory they suggest that neither poverty nor education has a direct causal impact on terrorism

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

impacts of opec s political risk on the international crude oil prices an empirical analysis based on the svar models abstract the impacts of opec s political risk on the fluctuations of international crude oil prices have caused widespread concern and analyzing the impacts is of great significance to the investment decisions and risk aversion strategies in the crude oil markets therefore using the international country risk guide icrg index as a proxy for the countries political risk situation we empirically investigate the impacts of opec s political risk on the brent crude oil prices based on several structural vector autoregression svar models the main empirical results indicate that 1 the political risk of opec countries does have a significant and positive influence on brent crude oil prices in the sample period from january 1998 to september 2014 and the most significant positive influences appear in about one and a half year and last about a year 2 opec s integrated political risk contributes to 17 58 of the oil price fluctuations in the sample period which is only lesser than that of the oil demand shocks 34 64 3 compared with the political risk of opec countries in north africa and south america the political risk of opec countries in the middle east contributes most to the oil price fluctuations 4 among the eight components of the political risk in opec the internal conflicts contribute most to the oil price fluctuations in the sample period

the impact of global oil price shocks on china s bulk commodity markets and fundamental industries this paper investigated the reaction of aggregate commodity market to oil price shocks and also explored the effects of oil price shocks on china s fundamental industries metals petrochemicals grains and oilfats we separated the volatilities of oil price into expected unexpected and negatively expected categories to identify how oil prices influence bulk commodity markets we contrasted the results between different periods and among classified indices in order to discover the significant changes in recent years and the differences at an industry level our results indicate that the aggregate commodity market was affected by both expected and unexpected oil price volatilities in china the impact of unexpected oil price volatilities became more complex after 2007 the metals and grains indices did not significantly respond to the expected volatility in oil prices in contrast to the petrochemicals and oilfats indices these results not only contribute to advancing the existing literature but also merit particular attention from policy makers and market investors in china

oil price shocks economic policy uncertainty and industry stock returns in china asymmetric effects with quantile regression abstract this paper investigates the impact of crude oil shocks and china s economic policy uncertainty on stock returns at different locations on the return distributions based on monthly data from 1995 1 to 2016 3 we address this issue by employing the quantile regression technique this approach enables a more detailed investigation in different market circumstances namely bearish normal and bullish markets empirical results indicate that the effects of oil price shocks and economic policy uncertainty are asymmetric and highly related to stock market conditions moreover both the nexus of oil and economic policy uncertainty stock are changed at the onset of a crisis specially rising oil prices have greater negative effects on stock returns when stock markets are bullish extreme higher quantiles before a crisis whereas the effects are significantly positive under different market conditions after the onset of the crisis falling oil prices lower stock returns when stock markets are bullish and normal before the crisis whereas lower stock returns under different market conditions except extreme bullish after the onset of the crisis these findings might be related to the optimistic or pessimistic investor sentiments and investors might become more frightened after the crisis

oil prices inflation and interest rates in a structural cointegrated var model for the g 7 countries sharp increases in the price of oil are generally seen as a major contributor to business cycle asymmetries moreover the very recent highs registered in the world oil market are causing concern about possible slowdowns in the economic performance of the most developed countries in this paper a structural cointegrated var model has been considered for the g 7 countries in order to study the direct effects of oil price shocks on output and prices and the reaction of monetary variables to external shocks our results can be summarized as follows i a stationary money demand as suggested by the classic theory of money can be identified for most countries ii according to the estimated coefficients of the structural part of the model for all countries except japan and u k the null hypothesis of an influence of oil prices on the inflation rate cannot be rejected inflation rate shocks are transmitted to the real economy by increasing interest rates iii impulse response analysis suggests for most countries the existence of an instantaneous temporary effect of oil price innovations on prices iv impulse response functions indicate different monetary policy reactions to inflationary and growth shocks v the simulation exercises directed to estimate the total impact of the 1990 oil price shock indicate that for some countries u s a significant part of the effects of the oil price shock is due to the monetary policy reaction function for other countries canada france and italy however the total impact is offset at least in part by an easing of monetary conditions

conciliation counterterrorism and patterns of terrorist violence what causes the increase in terrorism that reportedly often follows gov ernment concessions given this pattern why do governments ever conciliate terror ists i propose a model in which terrorist organizations become more militant following concessions because only moderate terrorists accept them leaving extremists in con trol governments nonetheless are willing to make concessions because their coun terterror capabilities improve because of the collusion of former terrorists former terrorists undertake this collusion to insure the credibility of government promises the model also yields hypotheses regarding the level of government investment in counterterror when moderates accept concessions the terms of negotiated settle ments the duration of terrorist conflicts incentives for moderate terrorists to radical ize their followers and incentives for governments to encourage extremist challenges to moderate terrorist leaders the model is illustrated with an application to the israeli0 palestinian conflict

metal volatility in presence of oil and interest rate shocks abstract this study uses three two factor volatility models of the garch family to examine the volatility behavior of three strategic commodities gold silver and copper in the presence of crude oil and interest rate shocks the results of the standard garch models suggest that gold and silver have almost the same volatility persistence which is greater than that of copper the cgarch estimates indicate that the short run transitory component of volatility converges to zero much faster for copper than for gold and silver in this sequence however the permanent volatility component demonstrates equally strong persistence in the long run for all three metals the egarch results suggest that the leverage effect is present and significant for copper only implying that gold and silver can be good investment in anticipation of bad times past oil shock does not impact all three metals similarly monetary policy and to leaser extent the oil shocks have calming effects on precious metals but not on copper if the t bill rate is used crises such as the 2003 iraq war heighten metal volatility these results have implications for derivatives valuations using gold as a reserve asset risk analysis and for the commodity exporting countries and commodity producing firms

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

on the dynamic effects of oil price shocks a study using industry level data abstract this paper analyzes the effects of oil price shocks on demand and supply in various industries the impulse responses of identified var models indicate that for industries that have a large cost share of oil such as petroleum refinery and industrial chemicals oil price shocks mainly reduce supply in contrast for many other industries with the automobile industry being a particularly important example oil price shocks mainly reduce demand the paper suggests that oil price shocks influence economic activities beyond that explained by direct input cost effects possibly by delaying purchasing decisions of durable goods

intimidation linking negotiation and conflict challenger demands a resource from defender in each period challenger chooses whether to attack if attacked defender chooses whether to concede the resource forever each player might be committed to ghting until victory before con ict begins defender can make nitely many offers con ict begins if challenger rejects all offers in equilibrium all offers except the last are unacceptable negotiation cannot eliminate con ict because a larger offer makes con ict increasingly attractive for challenger if negotiation fails prolonged con ict can happen in equilibrium even when uncertainty is vanishingly small we provide comparative statics regarding the probability and length of con ict

indexing and inflation abstract much of the opposition to indexation as a means of adapting to ongoing inflation arises from the view that indexation is itself inflationary this paper examines the basic for that view in a simple macroeconomic model in which budget deficits are in part financed through the printing of money it is shown that all aspects of indexing wage indexation bond indexation and tax indexation tend to increase the impact on the price level of any inflationary shock however this association between indexation and inflation is in large part a consequence of the monetary and fiscal policies being followed by the government evidence from a cross section of forty countries on the effects of indexation on the inflationary impact of the oil price shock of 1973 1974 suggests that indexation did not in general increase the inflationary impact of the oil shock the evidence is further consistent with the view that the absence of an excess inflationary effect of indexation is a result of the countries with substantial indexation not having accommodated the oil price shock as much as other countries

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

cross border mergers and acquisitions by oil and gas multinational enterprises geography based view of energy strategy abstract given that global crude oil prices are significantly dropped and business consolidation transactions are markedly increased in recent years this paper to date is the first to examine the cross border merger and acquisition strategy of oil and gas multinational enterprises using a fine tuned sample of 150 large scale oil acquisition transactions us 535 billion announced by oil and gas enterprises from over 50 countries during the period 2005 2015 we endeavor to answer four fundamental research questions who is where what for who is there why who is where and there and who is a serial acquirer to do so we propose an integrated framework of geography based view of energy strategy by leveraging theoretical insights from the energy economic geography international business strategy and corporate finance literature on top of that we discuss the dynamics of the oil and gas industry and show the remarkable trends in the crude oil prices over the past three decades 1990 2016 our geographic analyses highlight that state owned oil companies from asia and a less extent europe have rapidly expanded into resource rich countries such as canada and the us to secure oil reserves as well as acquire industry specific strategic assets this research contributes to the geography based view of energy strategy and discusses policy and managerial implications to sustain the world oil and gas industry

a public choice approach to international organization the purpose of this paper has been to develop a positive theory of international organization which can supplement the conventional normative theory used as a positive theory the conventional approach draws much of its plausibility from the fact that it relies on the reasons given by the decision makers and reported in the media and on the lofty objections stated in the charters of international agencies the public choice approach by its very nature is precluded from accepting such evidence in some respects it must appear dismal and perhaps cynical it is a positive theory which tries to explain but just as the conventional normative theory tends also to be used as a positive theory our positive theory is likely to have normative implications as well it does not imply that international organization is generally undesirable but it can be used to emphasize the advantages of decentralized policy making and to warn against a naive internationalism which welcomes international agreements for their own sake regardless of what is being agreed upon international organization can be and is abused and the cause is not an occasional lack of virtue among politicians but a systematic built in tendency toward collusion at the expense of the citizens such collusion is not only undesirable in itself there is also the danger that it discredits and crowds out unambiguously desirable forms of international cooperation agreements to remove non market obstacles to market interdependence in the field of international trade and capital movements

crucial issues concerning central bank independence abstract this paper argues first that it is inappropriate to presume that central banks will in the absence of any tangible precommitment technology inevitably behave in a discretionary fashion that implies an inflationary bias furthermore there is no necessary tradeoff between flexibility and commitment second to the extent that the absence of any precommitment technology is nevertheless a problem it will apply to a consolidated central bank plus government entity as well as to the central bank alone thus contracts between governments and central banks do not overcome the motivation for dynamic inconsistency they merely relocate it several implications are discussed

the interaction between food prices and oil prices this paper provides a statistical methodology to estimate the impact of oil price uncertainty on food prices in doing so it examines the joint impact of oil price and food price uncertainties and their correlation on the food price also the theoretical model was applied to the oil based trinidad and tobago and the empirical results confirm the theoretical predictions the empirical results indicate that a higher oil price increases food price also a higher oil price volatility yields a higher food price moreover an increase in the oil supply reduces the food price

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

global oil prices macroeconomic fundamentals and china s commodity sector comovements abstract this paper investigates the common movements of commodity sectors in china as well as the economic underpinnings of the comovements we employ a bayesian dynamic latent factor model to disentangle the common and idiosyncratic sector specific factors of the prices of a group of china s commodity sectors petrochemicals grains energy non ferrous metals oils fats and softs the results indicate that the common factor accounts for a significant portion of the fluctuations of china s commodity sectors providing evidence of the strong commodity sector comovements in china we further use a var model to link the common movements across china s commodity sectors to the underlying determinants including global oil price shocks and domestic macroeconomic fluctuations we find that the global oil price shocks have strong effects on the common movements across commodity sectors in china in addition to its domestic macroeconomic fluctuations at long horizons however at short horizons the common movements across commodity sectors in china respond more strongly to the global oil shocks than to its domestic macroeconomic fluctuations

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

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

religion terrorism and public goods testing the club model abstract can rational models once theological explanations are discredited explain why certain radical religious rebels are so successful in perpetrating suicide attacks the fundamental barrier to success turns out not to be recruiting suicide attackers there is a rational basis for volunteering rather the barrier is the danger of other operatives defecting a club model portraying voluntary religious organizations as efficient providers of local public goods explains how they weed out potential defectors by requiring sacrifices as signals of commitment they are thereby able to succeed in risky terrorist attacks the model has testable implications for tactic choice and damage achieved by clubs and other rebel organizations data spanning a half century on both terrorists and civil war insurgents much from middle east sources and israel palestine reveal that a missions organized by radical religious clubs that provide benign local public goods are both more lethal and are more likely to be suicide attacks than missions organized by other terrorist groups with similar aims and theologies and b suicide attacks are chosen when targets are hard i e difficult to destroy our results suggest benign tactics to counter radical religious terrorism and insurgency

the effects of crude oil shocks on stock market shifts behaviour a regime switching approach abstract in this paper we develop a two regime markov switching egarch model introduced by henry henry o 2009 regime switching in the relationship between equity returns and short term interest rates journal of banking and finance 33 405 414 to examine the relationship between crude oil shocks and stock markets an application to stock markets of uk france and japan over the sample period january 1989 to december 2007 illustrates plausible results we detect two episodes of series behaviour one relative to low mean high variance regime and the other to high mean low variance regime furthermore there is evidence that common recessions coincide with the low mean high variance regime in addition we allow both real stock returns and probability of transitions from one regime to another to depend on the net oil price increase variable the findings show that rises in oil price has a significant role in determining both the volatility of stock returns and the probability of transition across regimes

does terrorism work this paper examines whether terrorism is an effective tool for achieving political goals by exploiting geographic variation in terror attacks in israel from 1988 to 2006 we show that local terror attacks cause israelis to be more willing to grant territorial concessions to the palestinians these effects are stronger for demographic groups that are traditionally right wing in their political views however terror attacks beyond a certain threshold cause israelis to adopt a less accommodating position in addition terror induces israelis to vote increasingly for right wing parties as the right wing parties move to the left in response to terror hence terrorism appears to be an effective strategy in terms of shifting the entire political landscape to the left although we do not assess whether it is more effective than non violent means

jump dynamics with structural breaks for crude oil prices this study investigates the joint phenomena of permanent and transitory components in conditional variance and jump intensity along with verification of structural breaks for crude oil prices we adopt a component arji model with structural break analysis utilizing daily data on west texas intermediate crude oil spot and futures contracts the analytical results verify the existence of permanent and transitory components in conditional variance with the permanent component of conditional variance increasing with the occurrence of a sudden major event such as the iraqi invasion of kuwait operation desert storm and the war between the us and iraq and a relatively greater increase in the transitory component over the same period notably jump intensity fluctuates with an increase in the transitory component of conditional variance in response to abnormal events it is the transitory component which serves as the primary influential factor for jumps in returns therefore speculators are willing to take large risks particularly with respect to anticipating future price movements or gambling in the hopes of rapidly making substantial gains thus speculators prefer the temporary volatility component and engage in trade activities however investors prefer the permanent volatility component because they may well be better off relocating their assets into more stable portfolios to outperform the market portfolio over the long run

assassinations evaluating the effectiveness of an israeli counterterrorism policy using stock market data since the outbreak of the intifada in september 2000 the israeli government has extensively employed a policy of assassinating members of palestinian terrorist organizations theoretically the net effect of an assassination on future terrorism is indeterminate because it embodies two conflicting effects the assassination of a terrorist hurts his organization s capabilities but may increase the motivation for future attacks our indirect empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of assassinations for isreali counterterrorism is based on israeli stock market reactions to news of such operations we rely on the fact that terrorism has had significant adverse effects on the israeli economy and claim that the stock market should react positively to news about effective counterterrorism measures but negatively to news about counterproductive ones we find that the market does not react to assassinations of low ranked members of palestinian terrorist organizations the market does react strongly however to the assassinations of senior leaders of terrorist organizations it declines following assassinations targeting senior political leaders but rises following assassinations of senior military leaders to the extent that these reactions reflect expectations regarding future levels of terrorism they imply that the market perceives the first type of assassinations as counterproductive but the second as an effective measure in combating terrorism

inflationary finance under discrepion and rules inflationary finance involves first the tax on cash balances from expected inflation and second a capital levy from unexpected inflation from the standpoint of minimizing distortions these capital levies are attractive ex post to the policymaker in a full equilibrium two conditions hold 1 the monetary authority optimizes subject to people s expectations mechanisms and 2 people form expectations rationally given their knowledge of the policymaker s objectives the outcomes under discretionary policy are contrasted with those generated under rules in a purely discretionary regime the monetary authority can make no meaningful commitments about the future behavior of money and prices under an enforced rule it becomes possible to make some guarantees hence the links between monetary actions and inflationary expectations can be internalized there is a distinction between fully contingent rules and rules of simple form a simple rule allows the internalization of some connections between policy act ion and inflationary expectations but discretion permits some desirable flexibility of monetary growth this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

volatility spillovers in china s crude oil corn and fuel ethanol markets price volatility spillovers among china s crude oil corn and fuel ethanol markets are analyzed based on weekly price data from september 5 2003 to august 31 2012 employing the univariate egarch model and the bekk mvgarch model respectively the empirical results indicate a higher interaction among crude oil corn and fuel ethanol markets after september 2008 in the overall sample period the results simultaneously provide strong evidence that there exist unidirectional spillover effects from the crude oil market to the corn and fuel ethanol markets and double directional spillovers between the corn market and the fuel ethanol market however the spillover effects from the corn and fuel ethanol markets to the crude oil market are not significant

electoral terms and terrorism many terror attacks occur at the beginning of electoral terms we present a game theoretical model with incomplete information to account for this empirical pattern both terrorists and governments can be of weak or strong types we find that the risk of terror attacks is highest at the beginning of electoral terms because striking early allows the terrorists to collect valuable information about the government s type and also because terrorists know that even initially weak governments sometimes retaliate to show toughness closer to an upcoming election the model s predictions are consistent with anecdotal evidence

how do china s petrochemical markets react to oil price jumps a comparative analysis of stocks and commodities abstract the profound impacts of oil price jumps have caught the attention of scholars because the 2008 global financial crisis has seemingly already passed the existence of oil price jumps is in doubt in this paper we provide evidence that the threat of dynamic jumps still exists in the global oil market in the post crisis period while the stocks and commodities of china s petrochemical markets are both affected by those jumps to the best of our knowledge this is the first study of the reaction of petrochemical markets to oil price jumps in the post crisis period in addition a comparative analysis of petrochemical stocks and petrochemical commodity market is provided in particular we analyze the reactions of the returns and volatility of these markets to oil price jumps we obtained the following findings first the returns of petrochemical stocks and petrochemical commodities are both negatively affected by current oil price jumps while the effects of lagged jumps on these returns are opposite theoretically the former is a reflection of panic induced by extreme risk information while the latter is a reflection of rationality in speculators second the volatilities of petrochemical stocks and petrochemical commodities respond differently to oil price jumps the former is not affected whereas the latter is positively and negatively affected by current and last oil price jumps respectively finally all the above conclusions still hold when considering the effects of normal oil price volatility even after the co movement between oil prices and petrochemical markets is eliminated

dynamic jumps in global oil price and its impacts on china s bulk commodities abstract this paper investigated the impacts of oil price shocks especially dynamic jumps in its returns on china s bulk commodity markets at both the aggregate and industry levels after setting a zero lower bound to the jump intensity of the arji model we found that dynamic jumps exist in oil price movements moreover under shocks of oil price jumps not only the returns but also the risks of china s bulk commodity markets are affected significantly and the reactions of risks are characterized by overreactions meanwhile by decomposing oil price shocks into expected positive negative and unexpected positive negative components we discovered that the impacts of unexpected shocks are positive and significantly asymmetric at both levels while those of the expected shocks are negative and insignificantly asymmetric at the industry level in addition the volatility clustering of all price movements and the permanent volatility effects on china s bulk commodities are also authenticated by applying the garch family models

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

terrorism key assets and critical infrastructures to protect or to rebuild that is the question both the choice between stick and carrot and the tension between control and preservation of civil liberties characterize the policy debate over counterterrorism arguing for the carrot and preservation of civil liberties viewpoint frey and rohner def peace econ 18 3 245 252 2007 propose strategic reconstruction as an alternative to protection our paper provides a comparative analysis of these two policies first we study the rationality of the public s expectations and we show that credible strategic reconstruction may deter terrorist attacks next we derive conditions under which strategic reconstruction is more efficient than protection finally we show that strategic reconstruction may reinforce the efficiency of protection

mafia elections and violence against politicians organized crime uses political violence to influence politics in a wide set of countries this paper exploits a novel dataset of attacks directed towards italian local politicians to study how and why criminal organizations use violence against them we test two complementary theories to predict the use of violence i before elections to affect the electoral outcome and ii after elections to influence politicians from the beginning of their term we provide causal evidence in favor of the latter hypothesis the probability of being a target of violence increases in the weeks right after an election in areas with a high presence of organized crime especially when elections result in a change of local government

conditional jump dynamics in stock market returns this article develops a new conditional jump model to study jump dynamics in stock market returns we propose a simple filter to infer ex post the distribution of jumps this permits construction of the shock affecting the time t conditional jump intensity and is the main input into an autoregressive conditional jump intensity model the model allows the conditional jump intensity to be time varying and follows an approximate autoregressive moving average arma form the time series characteristics of 72 years of daily stock returns are analyzed using the jump model coupled with a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity garch specification of volatility we find significant time variation in the conditional jump intensity and evidence of time variation in the jump size distribution the conditional jump dynamics contribute to good in sample and out of sample fits to stock market volatility and capture the rally often observed in equity markets following a significant downturn

the impact of oil price shocks evidence from the industries of six oecd countries most of the studies about the macroeconomic consequences of oil price shocks have been focused on us aggregate data in contrast to these studies this paper empirically assesses the dynamic effect of oil price shocks on the output of the main manufacturing industries in six oecd countries the pattern of responses to an oil price shock by industrial output is diverse across the four european monetary union emu countries under consideration france germany italy and spain but broadly similar in the uk and the us moreover evidence on cross industry heterogeneity of oil shock effects within the emu countries is also reported

oil price uncertainty and clean energy stock returns new evidence from crude oil volatility index abstract earlier studies evidence that oil price shocks have significant impacts on clean energy stock returns while the previous literature uses traditional oil price series to investigate such effects we aim to assess whether the variance of alternative energy stock returns can be explained using the information content of crude oil volatility index ovx an indicator of oil price uncertainty to serve our purpose we employ several measures to frame the realized volatility rv of alternative energy sector equity returns in particular we use three different range based rv estimators recommended by parkinson 1980 rogers and satchell 1991 and alizadeh et al 2002 respectively our findings reveal that clean energy stock market returns are highly sensitive to ovx shocks thus oil market uncertainty measured by ovx embodies a crucial role in modeling the volatility of renewable energy equity returns in addition we find a strong indication that ovx provides additional information beyond what is contained in the historical volatilities of equity returns we also document that the magnitude of the effect of ovx is much bigger than that of the realized variance of wti oil spot prices finally we find that the information content of crude oil volatility index improves the volatility forecasts for the clean energy equity market

checks and balances private information and the credibility of monetary commitments the authors develop and test several new hypotheses about the anti inflationary effect of central bank independence and exchange rate pegs in the context of different institutions and different degrees of citizen information about government policies theory provides strong reason to believe that while central bank independence will prove more effective as a commitment mechanism in countries where multiple players in government have veto power checks and balances the number of veto players will have no effect on the credibility of exchange rate pegs conversely the authors argue that central bank independence does not solve the problems of commitment that arise when citizens are imperfectly informed about the contribution of government policy to inflation exchange rate pegs however mitigate these problems the authors present extensive evidence from cross country tests using newly developed data that provide strong support for their propositions

the roles of foreign aid and education in the war on terror this paper presents a theoretical framework and some empirical results showing that the level of foreign aid received reduces the supply of terrorist attacks by recipient countries as does the recipient country s level of education due account is taken of endogeneity problems in producing these results they suggest that western democracies which are the main targets of terrorist attacks should invest more funds in foreign aid with a special emphasis on supporting education

oil price biofuels and food supply abstract the price of oil could play a significant role in influencing the expansion of biofuels but this issue has yet to be fully investigated in the literature using a global computable general equilibrium cge model this study analyzes the impact of oil price on biofuel expansion and subsequently on food supply the study shows that a 65 increase in oil price in 2020 from the 2009 level would increase the global biofuel penetration to 5 4 in 2020 from 2 4 in 2009 if oil prices rise 150 from their 2009 levels by 2020 the resulting penetration of biofuels would be 9 which is higher than that would be caused by current mandates and targets introduced in more than forty countries around the world the study also shows that aggregate agricultural output drops due to an oil price increase but the drop is small in major biofuel producing countries as the expansion of biofuels would partially offset the negative impacts of the oil price increase on agricultural outputs an increase in oil price would reduce global food supply through direct impacts as well as through the diversion of food commodities and cropland towards the production of biofuels

oil price agricultural commodity prices and the dollar a panel cointegration and causality analysis abstract this study examines the dynamic relationship between world oil prices and twenty four world agricultural commodity prices accounting for changes in the relative strength of us dollar in a panel setting we employ panel cointegration and granger causality methods for a panel of twenty four agricultural products based on monthly prices ranging from january 1980 to february 2010 the empirical results provide strong evidence on the impact of world oil price changes on agricultural commodity prices contrary to the findings of many studies in the literature that report neutrality of agricultural prices to oil price changes we find strong support for the role of world oil prices on prices of several agricultural commodities the positive impact of a weak dollar on agricultural prices is also confirmed

on the excess co movement of commodity prices a note about the role of fundamental factors in short run dynamics abstract since the influential paper by pindyck and rotemberg 1990 the excess co movement of commodity prices the economic journal 100 1173 1189 there is a common belief that prices of unrelated commodities tend to move together in excess of what can be explained by fundamentals in this paper we consider monthly data of 51 commodities from 1980 to 2008 to confirm that raw resources exhibit co movement at high frequencies nonetheless focusing on oil and six metal prices we present evidence that the high level of correlation between cycles of commodity prices can be explained to a large extent by common shocks to inventory levels once the influences of supply and demand are filtered out it appears that the links between commodity prices are rather loose

a characterization of oil price behavior evidence from jump models abstract this paper is concerned with the statistical behavior of oil prices in two ways it firstly applies a combined jump garch model in order to characterize the behavior of daily weekly as well as monthly oil prices secondly it relates its empirical results to implications of hotelling type resource extraction models the empirical analysis shows that oil prices are characterized by garch as well as conditional jump behavior and that a considerable portion of the total variance is triggered by sudden extreme price movements this finding implies that first oil price signals are not reliable and as a consequence both finding optimal extraction paths and decisions regarding the transmission to alternative technologies are likely to be compromised second this behavior is in stark contrast to the notion of deterministic trends in the price of oil

the credibility of monetary reform new evidence the history of monetary policy is characterised by crisis and reform the paper is dedicated to an explanation of what makes monetary reforms successful a cross sectional econometric analysis is chosen to deal with this problem it is based on a standard macroeconomic model of commitment and credibility as the dependent variable we calculate a post reform inflation rate the exogenous variables are the degree of legal commitment the constraining influence of institutions and a new variable for ex ante credibility of the reform the paper allows for the conclusion that monetary commitment the consideration of institutional constraints and abstinence from the money press are crucial for the success of a monetary reform

modern hyper and high inflations since 1947 hyperinflations by cagan s definition in market economies have been rare much more common have been longer inflationary processes with inflation rates above 100 percent per annum based on a sample of 133 countries and using the 100 percent threshold as the basis for a definition of very high inflation episodes this paper examines the main characteristics of such inflations among other things we find that i close to 20 percent of countries have experienced inflation above 100 percent per annum ii higher inflation tends to be more unstable iii in high inflation countries the relationship between the fiscal balance and seigniorage is strong both in the short and long run iv inflation inertia decreases as average inflation rises v high inflation is associated with poor macroeconomic performance and vi stabilizations from high inflation that rely on the exchange rate as the nominal anchor are expansionary

politics and the suboptimal provision of counterterror i present a model of interactions between voters a government and a terrorist organization the model focuses on a previously unexplored conceptualization of counterterrorism as divided into tactic specific observable and general unobservable tactics when there is divergence between voters and government preferences strategic substitution among different modes of attack by terrorists and agency problems between the voters and government create a situation in which the politically optimal counterterrorism strategy pursued by the government in response to electoral and institutional incentives is quite different from the security maximizing counterterrorism strategy in particular in response to electoral pressure the government allocates resources to observable counterterror in excess of the social optimum this problem is particularly severe when governments put great weight on rent seeking or care less about counterterror than do voters and when terrorists have a large set of tactics from which to choose voters can decrease the magnitude of the agency problem by increasing the benefits of reelection by for example slackening requirements for nonsecurity related public goods i have received valuable comments and advice from bruce bueno de mesquita randy calvert martin cripps james fearon amanda friedenberg robert powell matthew stephenson and barbara walter i thank the weidenbaum center on the economy government and public policy at washington university for financial support

terrorist backlash terrorism mitigation and policy delegation abstract this paper presents a three stage proactive game involving terrorists elected policymakers and voters in each of two targeted countries a representative voter chooses an elected policymaker charged with deciding proactive countermeasures to ameliorate a transnational terrorist threat two primary considerations drive the voters strategic choice free riding on the other countries countermeasures and limiting a reprisal terrorist attack the resulting low proactive countermeasures benefit the terrorists whose attacks successfully exploit voters strategic actions this finding stems from a delegation problem where leadership by voters has a detrimental consequence on the well being of targeted countries domestic politics add another layer of concern when addressing a common terrorist threat

world oil prices and agricultural commodity prices evidence from an emerging market abstract oil prices are thought to have direct effect on agricultural prices followed by an indirect effect through the exchange rate this paper examines the short and long run interdependence between world oil prices lira dollar exchange rate and individual agricultural commodity prices wheat maize cotton soybeans and sunflower in turkey to this end the toda yamamoto causality approach and generalized impulse response analysis for identification of the long and short run interrelationships are applied to the monthly data spanning from january 1994 to march 2010 the impulse response analysis suggests the turkish agricultural prices do not significantly react to oil price and exchange rate shocks in the short run the long run causality analysis reveals that the changes in oil prices and appreciation depreciation of the turkish lira are not transmitted to agricultural commodity prices in turkey hence our results support neutrality of agricultural commodity markets in turkey to both direct and indirect effects of oil price changes

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

the cycle of violence an empirical analysis of fatalities in the palestinian israeli conflict thomas c schelling s the strategy of conflict 1960 laid the groundwork for thinking about conflicts as non zero sum games in which each side may choose to exercise or threaten violence in order to deter or incapacitate the opponent or simply to exact revenge it has been difficult however to test many of the predictions formulated by schelling and others because of the lack of data on the strategic choices of the two sides engaged in a conflict observed at a high enough frequency for statistical tests to have any power this paper uses daily frequency data to analyze the dynamics of violence during four years of the second intifada the most recent outburst of the palestinian israeli conflict

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