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

a resilience perspective of the seea abstract while the seea is an important advance in national accounting it remains deficient in a number of ways in regard to natural resources the dynamic and interactive nature of ecosystems means that any linear compartmentalised system of accounting will miss significant changes that influence human wellbeing in particular losses in resilience of critical capital stocks through changes in underlying ecosystem variables that do not contribute directly to valued flows and are therefore not included in the accounts means that the accounts will not recognise that such stocks are becoming riskier likely to collapse and are therefore over valued we present a stock based approach to measuring sustainable development the inclusive wealth approach of arrow kj dasgupta p and maler k g 2003 evaluating projects and assessing sustainable development in imperfect economies environmental and resource economics 26 647 685 at a regional scale using an example from south east australia which includes an assessment of the resilience of critical capital stocks

rethinking the brain drain abstract when productivity is fostered by both the individual s human capital and by the average level of human capital in the economy individuals underinvest in human capital a strictly positive probability of migration to a richer country by raising both the level of human capital formed by optimizing individuals in the home country and the average level of human capital of nonmigrants in the country can enhance welfare and nudge the economy toward the social optimum under a well controlled restrictive migration policy the welfare of all workers is higher than in the absence of this policy

the accounting push and the policy pull balancing environment and economic decisions abstract the use of information in environmental and economic policy has been a theme for over 100 years but standards for integrating environmental and economic information were not adopted until 2012 through the system of environmental economic accounting seea for 20 years the technical push to develop accounts proceeded largely independently of the pull from the intended or likely end users of accounts consequently governments have little knowledge of the accounting or how it might be used we examine why public policy imperatives have not yet pulled environmental accounting into the mainstream and explain how accounting can help reshape government decision making as part of this a model showing the place of accounts in the information system and the policy cycle is presented along with a research agenda and principles for the decision centred design of accounts we conclude that a phased implementation of the accounts as well as additional research into their applications will be needed to build practical understanding and political acceptance of the accounts

price indexes inequality and the measurement of world poverty i discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity ppp price indexes from the international comparison project global inequality increased with the latest revision of the icp and this reduced the global poverty line relative to the us dollar the recent large increase of nearly half a billion poor people came from an inappropriate updating of the global poverty line not from the icp revisions even so ppp comparisons between widely different countries rest on weak theoretical and empirical foundations i argue for wider use of self reports from international monitoring surveys and for a global poverty line that is truly denominated in us dollars

ecosystem service valuation for national accounting a reply to obst hein and edens 2016 while recent experimental frameworks for national ecosystem service accounting have shown substantial progress in our view some crucial methodological issues remain that deserve further consideration before setting final standards in response to the landmark work of obst et al environ resour econ 64 1 23 2016 doi 10 1007 s10640 015 9921 1 we provide arguments with regard to the suitability of particular valuation approaches generally we agree that respective valuation methods need to produce values that are consistent with national accounting standards such as representing exchange values however we disagree with their conclusions regarding specific valuation techniques firstly the circumstance that methods used for estimating shadow prices can also be used to derive consumer surplus does not justify the general exclusion of all shadow pricing methods for valuation of ecosystem services for national accounts especially for public ecosystem services secondly that preference based methods can also be used to assess welfare changes does not imply that cost based methods are generally better suited for ecosystem accounting to the contrary we see an essential need for preference information in accounting contexts thirdly that accounting standards use a written down replacement cost approach does not mean ecosystem accounting requires to employ a replacement cost approach to the contrary we argue that assessing ecosystem degradation through restoration costs would be in line with writing down depreciation but we also point to its limits

intersectoral transfer growth and inequality in rural ecuador abstract in this paper we study intersectoral transfer and its impact on the distribution of income in ecuador we find that income shares between farm and nonfarm activities are roughly equal on average although the rich in rural areas typically receive a greater share of income from nonfarm sources thus decomposing inequality by income source reveals that a rise in nonfarm incomes increases inequality drawing on a new method to estimate local level distributional outcomes growth of the high productivity nonfarm sector is observed to have a strong and positive association with average consumption and inequality growth of the low productivity nonfarm sector is associated with little change in either average income or income inequality irrespective of subsector growth of the nonfarm sector is associated with a substantial fall in poverty

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

rethinking ecosystem services to better address and navigate cultural values ecosystem service approaches have become a prominent basis for planning and management cultural services and non use values are included in all major typologies and present some of the most compelling reasons for conserving ecosystems though many barriers exist to their explicit characterization the values that conform least well to economic assumptions variously lumped together with as cultural services have proven elusive in part because valuation is complicated by the properties of intangibility and incommensurability which has in turn led to their exclusion from economic valuation we argue that the effectiveness of the ecosystem services framework in decision making is thwarted by i conflation of services values and benefits and ii failure to appropriately treat diverse kinds of values we address this challenge by 1 distinguishing eight dimensions of values which have implications for appropriate valuation and decision making 2 demonstrating the interconnected nature of benefits and services and so the ubiquity of intangible values 3 discussing the implications of these propositions for ecosystem services research and 4 outlining briefly a research agenda to enable decision making that is ecologically appropriate and socially just because many ecosystem services co produce cultural benefits full characterization of services must address non material values through methods from diverse social sciences

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

openness external risk and volatility implications for the compensation hypothesis a central assumption in the globalization literature is that economic openness generates economic insecurity and volatility based on this assumption schol ars of international political economy have proposed the compensation hypothesis which claims that globalization bolsters rather than undermines the welfare state by increasing public demand for social protection against externally generated eco nomic instability the openness volatility link is dubious however on both theoret ical and empirical grounds in this study i revisit the volatility assumption focusing on a crucial difference between openness and external risk in their effect on volatil ity my statistical analysis of a panel data set from 175 countries 1950 2002 finds a consistent effect of external risk on volatility of the major economic aggregates but a largely insignificant effect of openness these findings suggest that economic volatility may be a mistaken link in explaining the openness spending nexus calling for further research on the causal mechanisms linking the two the general growth of government in the post world war ii era is one of the most important empirical regularities in political science measured by general govern ment consumption or sectoral expenditures government size grew dramatically during most of the postwar period intrigued by this phenomenal government growth political scientists offered numerous accounts some viewing this growth as a corollary of economic phenomena such as modernization industrialization income distribution or fiscal illusion and others attributing government growth to political causes such as bureaucratization interest group politics and electoral competition 1

common persistence in conditional variances since the introduction of the autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic arch model in engle 1982 numerous applications of this modeling strategy have already appeared a common finding in many of these studies with high frequency financial or monetary data concerns the presence of an approximate unit root in the autoregressive polynomial in the univariate time series representation for the conditional second order moments of the process as in the so called integrated generalized arch igarch class of models proposed in engle and bollerslev 1986 in the igarch models shocks to the conditional variance are persistent in the sense that they remain important for forecasts of all horizons this idea is readily extended to a multivariate framework even though many time series may exhibit persistence in variance it is likely that several different variables share the same common long run component in that situation the variables are naturally defined to be co persistent in variance and the co persistent linear combination is interpretable as a long run relationship conditions for co persistence to occur in the multivariate linear garch model are presented these conditions parallel the conditions for linear co integration in the mean as developed by engle and granger 1987 the presence of co persistence has important implications for asset pricing relationships and in optimal portfolio allocation decisions an empirical example relating to the time series properties of nominal u s dollar exchange rates for the deutschemark and the british pound provides a simple illustration of the ideas

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

trade openness and child health a heterogeneous panel cointegration analysis in this paper we examine the impact of trade openness on child health based on a cross country panel data set covering 66 countries for the period 1960 2013 to account for the time series proper

on the links between stock and commodity markets volatility this paper investigates the links between price returns for 25 commodities and stocks over the period from january 2001 to november 2011 by paying a particular attention to energy raw materials relying on the dynamic conditional correlation dcc garch methodology we show that the correlations between commodity and stock markets evolve through time and are highly volatile particularly since the 2007 2008 financial crisis the latter has played a key role emphasizing the links between commodity and stock markets and underlining the financialization of commodity markets at the idiosyncratic level a speculation phenomenon is highlighted for oil coffee and cocoa while the safe haven role of gold is evidenced

oil and asset classes implied volatilities investment strategies and hedging effectiveness abstract building on the increased interest in oil prices and other financial assets this paper examines the dynamic conditional correlations among their implied volatility indices we then proceed to the examination of the optimal hedging strategies and optimal portfolio weights for implied volatility portfolios between oil and fourteen asset volatilities which belong to four different asset classes stocks commodities exchange rates and macroeconomic conditions the results suggest that the oil price implied volatility index ovx is highly correlated with the us and emerging stock market volatility indices whereas the lowest correlations are observed with the implied volatilities of gold and the euro dollar exchange rate hedge ratios indicate that vix is the least useful implied volatility index to hedge against oil implied volatility finally we show that investors can benefit substantially by adjusting their portfolios based on the dynamic weights and hedge ratios obtained from the dynamic conditional correlation models although a trade off exists between the level of risk reduction and portfolio profitability

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

is globalization reducing poverty and inequality abstract over the past 20 years or so india china and the rest of east asia experienced fast economic growth and falls in the poverty rate latin america stagnated the former soviet union central and eastern europe and sub saharan africa regressed but what are the net trends the neoliberal argument says that world poverty and income inequality fell over the past two decades for the first time in more than a century and a half thanks to the rising density of economic integration across national borders the evidence therefore confirms that globalization in the context of the world economic regime in place since the end of bretton woods generates more mutual benefit than conflicting interests this paper questions the empirical basis of the neoliberal argument

does globalization affect growth evidence from a new index of globalization the study develops an index of globalization covering its three main dimensions economic integration social integration and political integration using panel data for 123 countries in 1970 2000 it is analysed empirically whether the overall index of globalization as well as sub indexes constructed to measure the single dimensions affect economic growth as the results show globalization indeed promotes growth the dimensions most robustly related with growth refer to actual economic flows and restrictions in developed countries although less robustly information flows also promote growth whereas political integration has no effect

brand credibility and marketplace globalization the role of perceived brand globalness and localness consumers in western markets are increasingly critical towards globalization and re embrace local values companies thus must decide whether to continue to pursue global branding strategies and or rejuvenate local branding strategies to explore the implications of market globalization for consumer preferences we use signaling theory to investigate the role of perceived brand globalness pbg and brand localness pbl as signals of brand credibility related downstream effects and boundary conditions across two countries with differing levels of globalization in globalized markets pbg is a weaker signal of brand credibility than pbl whereas in globalizing markets the two signals are of equal importance

the effect of oil price volatility on strategic investment in this paper we investigate how oil price volatility affects the strategic investment decisions of a large panel of us firms this paper uses key insights from the real options literature to develop a model of a company s strategic investment and shows how changes in oil price volatility can impact strategic investment decisions the model is estimated using recently developed generalized method of moment estimation techniques for panel data sets empirical results are presented to show that there is a u shaped relationship between oil price volatility and firm investment this is consistent with the predictions from the strategic growth options literature the results should be useful to decision makers investors managers policy makers and others who need to make strategic investment decisions in an uncertain world

tourism trade and growth the case of cyprus although the relationship between international trade and economic growth has found a wide application area in the literature over the years this can not be said about tourism and growth or trade and tourism this study employs the bounds test for cointegration and granger causality tests to investigate a long run equilibrium relationship between tourism trade and real income growth and the direction of causality among themselves for cyprus results reveal that tourism trade and real income growth are cointegrated thus a long run equilibrium relationship can be inferred between these three variables on the other hand granger causality test results suggest that real income growth stimulates growth in international trade both exports and imports and international tourist arrivals to the island furthermore growth in international trade both exports and imports also stimulates an increase in international tourist arrivals to cyprus and finally real import growth stimulate growth in real export

volatility behavior of oil industrial commodity and stock markets in a regime switching environment abstract this study supplements previous regime switching studies on wti crude oil and finds two possible volatility regimes for the strategic commodity prices of brent oil wti oil copper gold and silver and the s p 500 index but with varying high to low volatility ratios the dynamic conditional correlations dccs indicate increasing correlations among all the commodities since the 2003 iraq war but decreasing correlations with the s p 500 index the commodities also show different volatility persistence responses to financial and geopolitical crises while the s p 500 index responds to both financial and geopolitical crises implications are discussed

natural capital accounts and public policy decisions findings from a survey abstract there have been many initiatives and policy commitments in natural capital accounting in the recent years based on a survey for statistical offices ministries and independent experts worldwide we provide some preliminary evidence that there is very little use of natural capital accounts for public policy decisions and more so in developing countries the most relevant obstacles are the lack of political support by key people and institutional leadership unable to promote policy use by other ministries concerning developing countries the factor which is considered as the most relevant in preventing the use of natural capital accounts for policy making is the stage of development of the country in addition respondents from statistical institutes and developing countries are firstly concerned about institutional obstacles and secondly about data availability and cooperation respondents from ministries and independent experts are particularly concerned about design obstacles not many accounts may be available to be used in the policy making process due to data gaps design challenges and the required investment the problem being more acute in developing countries a key result of the survey is the need to evaluate the added value of natural capital accounts with respect to statistics

the selection principle and market failure in systems competition abstract if governments stepped in where markets failed reintroducing markets through the backdoor of systems competition will again result in market failure three models are presented which illustrate this wisdom the first is concerned with congestion prone public goods and shows that fiscal competition may be ruinous for the governments the second considers the insurance function of redistributive taxation and shows that systems competition may suffer from adverse selection the third studies the role of quality regulation and shows that systems competition may be a competition of laxity resulting in inefficiently low quality standards

the impact of sources of energy production on globalization evidence from panel data analysis abstract greenhouse gas ghg emission is one of the major reasons for global warming and climate change among various sources responsible for ghg emission energy generation is found to be the leading one increased economic activities facilitated by the ever expanding level of globalization lead to substantial accumulation of ghg in the atmosphere hence the relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation remains a primary concern to policymakers as well as concerned stakeholders this study aims at investigating the relationship between the sources of energy production fossil sources and renewables and the level of globalization a panel data consisting of 26 countries from the list of annex i parties to the united nations framework convention on climate change unfccc for 21 years has been analyzed the study finds that an increase in the electricity production from fossil based sources i e oil and coal reduces the level of globalization it also supports the argument that coal is more detrimental to the environment moreover this study finds a significant negative influence of the use of renewables for energy production on the level of globalization this finding supports the premise that renewable energy is used domestically and works as import substitute for energy demand leading to a negative effect on globalization further study in developing countries with larger sample may help compare and contrast the effect of sources of energy on globalization

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

u s stock returns and oil prices the tale from daily data and the 2008 2009 financial crisis abstract using daily data from january 1999 to december 2011 we examine u s stock returns s p 500 dow jones nasdaq and russell 2000 based on a wide range of information including equity vix volatility inflation expectations interest rates gold prices and the usd euro exchange rate the focus is on oil price returns which have been previously found to exert mostly negative effects on u s stock returns identifying the crisis of 2008 2009 as a significant period of economic contraction and subsequent recovery we check the stability of the stock oil relationship by garch and mgarch dcc models prior to the financial crisis stock returns are slightly negatively affected by oil prices and by the usd euro for the subsample of mid 2009 onwards however stock returns are positively affected by oil prices and a weaker usd euro as with inflation expectations we interpret these findings as u s stocks responding positively to expectations of recovery worldwide our proposed explanation is due to the changing correlation between stock markets and oil either by standard garch models or by mgarch dcc models allowing the implied correlation to vary over time

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

trade and poverty in the poor countries now widely regarded as economically benign in the sense that it increases the size of the pie the recent anti globalization critics have suggested that it is socially malign on several dimensions among them the question of poverty 2 their contention is that trade accentuates not ameliorates and that it deepens not diminishes poverty in both the rich and the poor countries the theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of freer trade on poverty in the rich and in the poor countries is not symmetric of course we focus here only on the latter in doing so we distinguish between two different strands of argumentation static and dynamic

corruption and development a review of issues in this paper we start with a discussion of some of the different denotations of the problem of corruption we then consider the ways in which the damaging consequences of corruption operate in a developing economy while not ignoring its possible redeeming features in some cases we pursue the question of why corruption is perceptibly so different in different societies and also persistent finally we examine the feasible policy issues that arise in this context

looking beyond averages in the trade and poverty debate there has been much debate about how much poor people in developing countries gain from trade openness as one aspect of globalization the paper views the issue through both macro and micro empirical lenses the macro lens uses cross country comparisons and aggregate time series data the micro lens uses household level data combined with structural modeling of the impacts of specific trade reforms case studies are presented for china and morocco both the macro and micro approaches cast doubt on some widely heard generalizations from both sides of the globalization debate additionally the micro lens indicates considerable heterogeneity in the welfare impacts of trade openness with both gainers and losers among the poor a number of covariates of the individual gains are identified the results point to the importance of combining trade reforms with well designed social protection policies

do we need ecosystem accounts the internationally adopted system of environmental economic accounting measures the interaction between the economy and the natural environment its central framework accounts for the depletion of natural resources but omits environmental degradation notably from pollution a recent companion volume on experimental ecosystem accounting addresses ecosystem degradation but excludes the depletion of natural assets its physical accounts notably on land cover and use could support the management and conservation of ecosystems policies of sustainable economic performance and growth require however integrative information on both depletion and degradation at national and sectoral levels integrated environmental and economic accounts can provide this information without the detour of ecosystem accounting

international trade and unemployment theory and cross national evidence abstract we present a model of trade and search induced unemployment where trade results from heckscher ohlin h o and or ricardian comparative advantage using cross country data on trade policy unemployment and various controls and controlling for endogeneity and measurement error problems we find fairly strong and robust evidence for the ricardian prediction that unemployment and trade openness are negatively related this effect dominates the positive h o effect of trade openness on unemployment for capital abundant countries which turns negative for labor abundant countries using panel data we find an unemployment increasing short run impact of trade liberalization followed by an unemployment reducing effect leading to the new steady state

nonmarket benefits of nature what should be counted in green gdp abstract green gross domestic product green gdp is meant to account for nature s value on an equal footing with the market economy several problems bedevil green gdp however one is that nature does not come prepackaged in units like cars houses and bread even worse green gdp requires measurement of the benefits arising from public goods provided by nature for which there are no market indicators of value so what should green gdp count that is the subject of this paper ecological and economic theories are used to describe what should be counted and what should not if green gdp is to account for the nonmarket benefits of nature

is globalization reducing absolute poverty summary using data from 114 countries 1983 2007 we examine the relationship between globalization and world bank absolute poverty estimates we find a significant negative correlation between globalization and poverty robust to several econometric specifications including a fixed effect panel a long run first difference and a pooled ols regression introducing two instruments for globalization we also show that results are robust to correction for potential endogeneity we motivate and test the instruments in several ways in particular information flows and more liberal trade restrictions robustly correlate with lower absolute poverty

a neoclassical model of unemployment and the business cycle this paper investigates a general equilibrium model of unemployment and the business cycle in which specialization of labor plays a key role a rational expectations equilibrium with fully flexible wages and prices can exhibit unemployment in which the marginal product of employed workers exceeds the reservation wage of those who are without jobs workers are unemployed either because they are in the process of relocating for a better job or because they are waiting for conditions in the depressed sector to improve moreover seemingly small disruptions in the supplies of primary commodities such as energy could be the source of fluctuations in aggregate employment and can exert surprisingly large effects on real output

natural resources education and economic development economic growth since 1965 has varied inversely with the share of natural capital in national wealth across countries four main channels of transmission from abundant natural resources to stunted economic development are discussed a the dutch disease b rent seeking c overconfidence and d neglect of education public expenditure on education relative to national income expected years of schooling for girls and gross secondary school enrolment are all shown to be inversely related to the share of natural capital in national wealth across countries natural capital appears to crowd out human capital thereby slowing down the pace of economic development

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

the evidence on globalisation globalisation is blamed for many socioeconomic shortcomings i discuss the consequences of globalisation by surveying the empirical globalisation literature my focus is on the kof indices of globalisation that have been used in more than 100 studies early studies using the kof index reported correlations between globalisation and several outcome variables studies published more recently identify causal effects the evidence shows that globalisation has spurred economic growth promoted gender equality and improved human rights moreover globalisation did not erode welfare state activities did not have any significant effect on labour market interaction and hardly influenced market deregulation it increased however within country income inequality the consequences of globalisation thus turn out to be overall much more favourable than often conjectured in the public discourse

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

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

how sensitive are consumer expenditures to retail energy prices abstract there is growing evidence that the primary effect of energy price shocks on the u s economy involves a reduction in consumer spending we quantify the direct effect on real consumption of unanticipated changes in discretionary income shifts in precautionary savings and changes in the operating cost of energy using durables the possibility of asymmetries in the response of real consumption to energy price shocks is also considered we demonstrate that linear models are consistent with the symmetric behavior of real consumption in 1979 when energy prices increased sharply and in 1986 when they fell sharply it is shown that historically energy price shocks have been an important factor in explaining u s real consumption growth but by no means the dominant factor

correlations and volatility spillovers between oil prices and the stock prices of clean energy and technology companies abstract in this paper multivariate garch models are used to model conditional correlations and to analyze the volatility spillovers between oil prices and the stock prices of clean energy companies and technology companies four different multivariate garch models bekk diagonal constant conditional correlation and dynamic conditional correlation are compared and contrasted the dynamic conditional correlation model is found to fit the data the best and generates results showing that the stock prices of clean energy companies correlate more highly with technology stock prices than with oil prices on average a 1 long position in clean energy companies can be hedged for 20 cents with a short position in the crude oil futures market

oil prices stock markets and portfolio investment evidence from sector analysis in europe over the last decade this article extends the understanding of oil stock market relationships over the last turbulent decade unlike previous empirical investigations which have largely focused on broad based market indices national and or regional indices we examine short term linkages in the aggregate as well as sector by sector levels in europe using different econometric techniques our main findings suggest that the reactions of stock returns to oil price changes differ greatly depending on the activity sector in the out of sample analysis we show that introducing oil asset into a diversified portfolio of stocks allows to significantly improve its risk return characteristics

hedging emerging market stock prices with oil gold vix and bonds a comparison between dcc adcc and go garch while much research uses multivariate garch to model volatility dynamics and risk measures one particular type of multivariate garch model go garch has been underutilized this paper uses dcc adcc and go garch to model volatilities and conditional correlations between emerging market stock prices oil prices vix gold prices and bond prices a rolling window analysis is used to construct out of sample one step ahead forecasts of dynamic conditional correlations and optimal hedge ratios in most of the situations we study oil is the best asset to hedge emerging market stock prices hedge ratios from the adcc model are preferred most effective for hedging emerging market stock prices with oil vix or bonds hedge ratios estimated from the go garch are most effective for hedging emerging market stock prices with gold in some instances these results are reasonably robust to choice of model refits forecast length and distributional assumptions

towards a structural model of the tourist experience an illustration from food experiences in tourism abstract the tourist experience has for a long time been one sidedly understood as either the peak experience or the consumer experience for a better understanding of the tourist experience this paper tries to build a conceptual model in which both dimension of the tourist experience are integrated as a structured and interrelated whole the position and role of each experiential component such as eating sleeping transportation and so on in tourism can be more clearly understood in terms of this model for an illustration of the model food experience in tourism is examined in detail it is demonstrated that food consumption in tourism can be either the peak touristic experience or the supporting consumer experience dependent upon specific circumstances

correlated arch corrarch modelling the time varying conditional correlation between financial asset returns abstract although the time variation of the conditional correlations of asset returns is a well established stylized fact and of crucial importance for efficient financial decisions there is no explicit general model available for its estimation and forecasting in this paper we propose a bivariate garch covariance structure in which conditional variances can follow any garch type process while conditional correlation is generated by an explicit discrete time stochastic process the corrarch process a high order corrarch can parsimoniously be represented by a corgarch process the model successfully generates the reported stylized facts establishes an autocorrelation structure for correlations and thus provides an explicit framework for out of sample forecasting we provide empirical evidence from the g7 stock market indexes

meteor showers or heat waves heteroskedastic intra daily volatility in the foreign exchange market this paper seeks to explain the causes of volatility clustering in exchange rates careful examination of intra daily exchange rates provides a test of two hypotheses heat waves and meteor showers the heat wave hypothesis is that the volatility has only country specific autocorrelation alternatively the meteor shower is a phenomenon of intra daily volatility spillovers from one market to the next using the garch model to specify the heteroskedasticity across intra daily market segments we find that the empirical evidence is generally against the null hypothesis of the heat wave using a volatility type of vector autoregression we examine the impact of news in one market on the time path of per hour volatility in other markets

a brief review of some problems in using national accounts data in level of output comparisons and growth studies abstract after an initial burst of enthusiasm for establishing their national accounts 30 or 40 years ago some countries have made continuous improvements while others have done little to maintain even their initial system presently most developing countries make their basic estimate of gdp from the production side and most do not have adequate surveys to permit a consistency check of their production and expenditure side estimates the base surveys for expenditures and production are typically over ten years old and the lags in basic surveys for constructing constant price estimates are frequently longer a number of countries estimate their growth from a weighted average of volume indexes and make no attempt at direct deflation many of those that do deflate their current expenditure estimates do so at a very aggregate level users of national accounts should be aware of the varying quality of the estimates across countries and hopefully continual questioning of the numbers will help to encourage improvement

oil volatility oil and gas firms and portfolio diversification abstract this paper investigates the volatility spillovers and co movements among oil prices and stock prices of major oil and gas corporations over the period between 18th june 2001 and 1st february 2016 to do so we use the spillover index approach by diebold and yilmaz 2009 2012 2014 2015 and the dynamic correlation coefficient model of engle 2002 so as to identify the transmission mechanisms of volatility shocks and the contagion of volatility among oil prices and stock prices of oil and gas companies respectively given that volatility transmission across oil and major oil and gas corporations is important for portfolio diversification and risk management we also examine optimal weights and hedge ratios among the aforementioned series our results point to the existence of significant volatility spillover effects among oil and oil and gas companies stock volatility however the spillover is usually unidirectional from oil and gas companies stock volatility to oil volatility with bp chevron exxon shell and total being the major net transmitters of volatility to oil markets conditional correlations are positive and time varying with those between each of the aforementioned companies and oil being the highest finally the diversification benefits and hedging effectiveness based on our results are discussed

u s equity and commodity futures markets hedging or financialization abstract in this paper we investigate the hedging versus the financialization nature of commodity futures vis a vis the equity market using a arma filter based correlation approach our results suggest that while gold futures are typically seen as a hedge against unfavorable fluctuations in the stock market the majority of commodity futures appears to be treated as a separate asset class in line with their increasing financialization our results are robust to the presence of inflation highlight the hedging role played by fuel energy commodity futures in the nineties and reveal that the commodity financialization boosted since the 2000s we also show that gold futures are partially a safe haven for equity investments in the short term but not in the mid term finally we uncover some hedging financialization of crude oil futures associated to global demand oil supply shocks

trade openness and economic growth a cross country empirical investigation abstract this paper demonstrates that trade liberalization does not have a simple and straightforward relationship with growth using a large number of openness measures for a cross section of countries over the last three decades we use two groups of trade openness measures the regression results for numerous trade intensity ratios are mostly consistent with the existing literature however contrary to the conventional view on the growth effects of trade barriers our estimation results show that trade barriers are positively and in most specifications significantly associated with growth especially for developing countries and they are consistent with the findings of theoretical growth and development literature

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

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

does globalisation affect the shadow economy we investigate the impact of globalisation on the shadow economy using panel data for 119 countries our evidence suggests that globalisation matters in mitigating shadow development more specifically we find that political globalisation reduces the shadow economy whereas economic and social globalisations have limited statistical support after controlling for important factors that affect the size of the shadow economy overall these results are robust after accounting for an alternative measure of the shadow economy outliers endogeneity and alternative model specifications

optimal hedging under biased energy futures markets abstract optimal futures hedging positions for those agents trying to maximize their expected utility will depend on their view about the evolution of the market and on how risk adverse they are the most risk adverse agents will probably decide to full cover their positions but when a futures bias exists hedgers with moderate or low degree of risk aversion can alter their strategy depending on the expected gains in futures markets in our application to the uk natural gas market we find a statistically significant time varying negative futures bias that can be forecasted with confidence as a result of this bias most effective and best performing hedging strategies for moderate risk averse agents are those involving short long hedging in winter summer with a hedging ratio above below the minimum variance hedge ratio these findings are of great interest to practitioners in the uk natural gas markets and the methodology can be extrapolated to other energy markets

mobile phones and economic development in rural peru the authors estimate the effects of mobile phone coverage on different measures of economic development the authors exploit the timing of mobile coverage at the village level merging it with a village level panel dataset for rural peru the main findings suggest that mobile phone expansion has increased household real consumption by 11 percent reduced poverty incidence by 8 percentage points and decreased extreme poverty by 5 4 percentage points moreover those benefits appear to be shared by all covered households regardless of mobile ownership

feedback spillover dynamics of crude oil and global assets indicators a system wide network perspective abstract crude oil the critical driver of the world economy is quick to be blamed for causing volatility in all classes of assets viz equity commodities bonds and currencies the feedback mechanism between crude oil and these four asset classes makes the volatility spillover connectedness dynamics more complex and an important area to explore henceforth we quantify and analyze the time varying system wide volatility spillover connectedness dynamics of crude oil and global asset indicators gais covering four major asset classes for the period from 2000 to 2016 additionally we have used the confluence of generalized error variance decomposition gevd and network diagrams according to the findings of this paper crude oil is affected more by the gais than vice versa thus making the crude oil price more vulnerable to volatility fluctuations in gais on a pairwise basis the study finds that commodities and currency are more tightly knit to crude oil with cadusd and gold being more sensitive to crude oil price fluctuations in addition the equity indices of the us and the uk have become more sensitive to crude oil price volatility following the gfc the study opens future discourse for portfolio managers and policymakers to explore the spillover pattern and act accordingly by mitigating risk via the compensatory mechanism of positive negative spillover pairs

aid and growth what does the cross country evidence really show abstract we examine the effects of aid on growth in cross sectional and panel data after correcting for the possible bias that poorer or stronger growth may draw aid contributions to recipient co

the simultaneous evolution of growth and inequality research on inequality and growth can be divided into two strands one deriving from kuznets and lewis has tried to identify a mechanistic relationship between growth or level of income and inequality the other has tried to find causal explanations of growth and inequality treating each independently in this paper we draw from both strands to test whether growth and inequality are the joint outcomes of other variables and processes we find that simultaneous examination of growth and inequality yields significantly different results and has different consequences for policy from previous independent studies the empirical literature on growth and inequality can be divided into two broad strands one following the pioneering work of kuznets and lewis is motivated by the pessimistic conjecture that the process of growth and development somehow requires increasing inequality at least in the early stages this has led to many efforts to identify a mechanical relationship between the level of development and inequality anand and kanbur 1993 or to determine whether faster growth requires higher or lower inequality the second strand has sought to identify the causal factors influencing the evolution of growth and inequality independently this research has looked either at growth for example barro and sala i martin 1995 or at inequality li et al 1997 but has not tried to identify those factors that might simultaneously influence both growth and inequality 2 thus the literature that looks simultaneously at growth and inequality descending most notably from kuznets 1955 relates them in a mechanistic manner that ignores or minimises the role of other causal factors including policy while the literature that incorporates other causal factors including policies looks independently at growth and inequality neither approach is particularly convincing from a theoretical standpoint the evolution of growth and inequality must surely be the outcome of similar processes in addition neither approach is particularly useful for the policy maker who needs to balance the impact of policies on both growth and distribution in this paper we investigate whether growth and inequality are simultaneously determined and if so whether or not they are subject to

not by growth alone the role of the distribution of income in regional diversity in poverty reduction this study examines the role of the distribution of income in determining the responsiveness of poverty to income growth and changes in income inequality using panel data of 58 developing countries for the period 1980 1998 we show that the large cross regional variation in the capacity of income growth to reduce poverty i e the income elasticity is largely explained by differences in the initial distribution of income and present region and time specific estimates of the income and gini elasticities of poverty we find that the income elasticity of poverty in the mid 1990s equals 1 31 on average and ranges from 0 71 for sub saharan africa to 2 27 for the middle east and north africa and that the gini elasticity of poverty equals 0 80 on average and ranges from 0 01 in south asia to 1 73 in latin america furthermore we show that while differing income growth rates account for most of the regional diversity in poverty trends the additional impact of differences across regions in rates of inequality change and income and inequality elasticities of poverty is almost always significant and far too large to be ignored most notably so in eastern europe and central asia

modeling asymmetric comovements of asset returns existing time varying covariance models usually impose strong restrictions on how past shocks affect the forecasted covariance matrix in this article we compare the restrictions imposed by the four most popular multivariate garch models and introduce a set of robust conditional moment tests to detect misspecification we demonstrate that the choice of a multivariate volatility model can lead to substantially different conclusions in any application that involves forecasting dynamic covariance matrices like estimating the optimal hedge ratio or deriving the risk minimizing portfolio we therefore introduce a general model which nests these four models and their natural asymmetric extensions the new model is applied to study the dynamic relation between large and small firm returns article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies