factor demand technical change and inter fuel substitution in africa abstract the translog production function has been widely used in applied production analysis due to its flexibility and superiority over other functional forms this study develops a translog production function for a group of african countries the random effects model is estimated using generalized least squares estimator the main findings are first output in africa is driven by a more intensive use of petroleum and electricity and to a lesser extent capital labor and coal relative to technological progress second african production technology exhibits increasing returns to scale suggesting a path towards market entry barriers third technical change is scale biased and factor augmenting albeit very slow fourth all energy inputs are substitutes indicating africa s potential to proportionally switch towards cleaner fuels without adversely affecting economic growth finally and perhaps more generally the study reinforces the assertion that imposing restrictions like homotheticity homogeneity or separability on the production technology is unrealistic and should rather be a testable hypothesis within any applied analysis in view of the documented findings relevant implications for africa are discussed

energy consumption and gdp in developing countries a cointegrated panel analysis in this paper we re investigate the co movement and the causality relationship between energy consumption and gdp in 18 developing countries using data for the period 1975 to 2001 recently developed tests for the panel unit root heterogeneous panel cointegration and panel based error correction models are employed the empirical results provide clear support of a long run cointegration relationship after allowing for the heterogeneous country effect the long run relationship is estimated using a full modified ols the evidence shows that long run and short run causalities run from energy consumption to gdp but not vice versa this result indicates that energy conservation may harm economic growth in developing countries regardless of being transitory or permanent

disaggregate energy consumption employment and income in turkey the purpose of this paper is to contribute to literature on energy consumption and economic growth relationship by examining how much of the variance in national income growth can be explained by the growth of different sources of energy consumption and employment in turkey we use the recently developed generalized forecast error variance decomposition technique of koop et al j econom 74 1996 119 and pesaran and shin econ lett 58 1998 17 to determine the information content of the growth rate of energy consumption waste seems to have the largest initial impact followed by oil however over a 3 year horizon lignite appears to explain the largest forecast error variance of gdp the total energy consumption explains 21 of forecast error variance of gdp energy consumption appears to be almost as important as employment in turkey therefore policy makers may be interested in identifying the energy dependencies of economic growth in allocating the energy investment budget

energy consumption and gdp causality relationship in g 7 countries and emerging markets abstract the causality relationship between energy consumption and income is a well studied topic in energy economics this paper studies the time series properties of energy consumption and gdp and reexamines the causality relationship between the two series in the top 10 emerging markets excluding china due to lack of data and g 7 countries we discover bi directional causality in argentina causality running from gdp to energy consumption in italy and korea and from energy consumption to gdp in turkey france germany and japan hence energy conservation may harm economic growth in the last four countries

disaggregated energy consumption and gdp in taiwan a threshold co integration analysis abstract energy consumption growth is much higher than economic growth for taiwan in recent years worsening its energy efficiency this paper provides a solid explanation by examining the equilibrium relationship between gdp and disaggregated energy consumption under a non linear framework the threshold co integration test developed with asymmetric dynamic adjusting processes proposed by hansen and seo hansen b e seo b 2002 testing for two regime threshold cointegration in vector error correction models journal of econometrics 110 293 318 is applied non linear co integrations between gdp and disaggregated energy consumptions are confirmed except for oil consumption the two regime vector error correction models vecm show that the adjustment process of energy consumption toward equilibrium is highly persistent when an appropriately threshold is reached there is mean reverting behavior when the threshold is reached making aggregate and disaggregated energy consumptions grow faster than gdp in taiwan

the relationship between energy and production evidence from turkish manufacturing industry this paper investigates the relationship between energy and production at the industry level in an emerging market turkey in a multivariate framework the electricity consumption and value added relation is examined in the turkish manufacturing industry while also accounting for labor and fixed investment we find that labor fixed investment electricity consumption and value added are related via three cointegrating vectors the vec results indicate uni directional causality running from electricity consumption to value added generalized impulse response and variance decomposition analyses confirm these results thus energy input appears to be closely related to production hence energy saving technologies and increased energy efficiency may increase the growth in manufacturing value added

an investigation of co integration and causality between energy consumption and economic activity in taiwan applying hsiao a version of the granger causality method this paper examines the causality between energy and gnp and energy and employment by applying recently developed techniques of co integration and hsiao s version of the granger causality to taiwanese data for the 1955 1993 period the phillips perron tests reveal that the series with the exception of gnp are not stationary and therefore differencing is performed to secure stationarity the study finds causality running from gdp to energy consumption without feedback in taiwan it is also found that causality runs from gdp to energy but not vice versa

the response of expenditures to anticipated income changes panel data estimates standard models of intertemporal allocation predict that the time path of expenditures should be independent of the time path of income recently two papers parker 1999 and souleles 1999 have suggested that u s households have a high marginal propensity to spend within year anticipated income changes we use an expenditure survey panel from spain to re examine this issue we exploit two important features of the spanish data first we have quarterly panel data that follows households for more than four quarters second we use the fact that workers are exogenously sorted into one of two payment schemes some receive the same amount each month of the year and others receive an extra payment in june and december the extra payment is large and predictable we examine the detailed pattern of expenditures over the year to see whether they differ between the two groups we fail to find even weak differences we complement this with a conventional euler equation analysis of excess sensitivity our predicting equation for quarterly earnings growth is much better than usual and is likely to give a powerful test of the hypothesis that predictable changes in income do not lead to changes in expenditure patterns the results of this analysis confirm the graphical analysis we find no evidence of excess sensitivity we conclude that households in normal times do smooth consumption over the year we suggest a reconciliation of our results with those of parker and souleles

the role of natural gas consumption and trade in tunisia s output this paper examines the impact of natural gas consumption real gross fixed capital formation and trade on the real gdp in case of tunisia over the period of 1980 2010 we used auto regressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach to test the existence of long run relationship between the variables the vector error correction method vecm granger approach is applied to test the direction of causal relation between the series our findings indicate the existence of long run relationship among the variables natural gas consumption real gross fixed capital formation and trade add in economic growth natural gas consumption real gross fixed capital formation and real trade granger cause real gdp these findings open up new insights for policy makers to formulate a comprehensive energy policy to sustain economic growth for long run

the reaction of household consumption to predictable changes in social security taxes the key implication of rational expectations and the basic life cycle permanent income hypothesis that predictable changes in income have no effect on the growth rate of consumption expenditures is examined this implication is important for understanding the effectiveness and optimal timing of fiscal policy the causes and propagation of business cycles and the effects of income fluctuations on the growth rate of the economy using household level consumption data from the consumer expenditure survey whether expenditures on nondurable goods increase contemporaneously with predictable changes in social security tax withholding is tested it is found that households do change their consumption expenditures in response to the predictable fluctuations in income induced by the social security tax system

exploring the relationship between energy use and economic growth with bivariate models new evidence from g 7 countries abstract there is a rapidly growing literature on the interaction between energy use and economic development with many analysts drawing policy conclusions on the basis of granger causality tests that involve only an energy and an economic variable this paper attempts to demonstrate empirically that such studies although useful for certain applications may be of limited use for policy purposes after outlining theoretical and methodological issues associated with such approaches i apply bivariate energy economy causality tests for canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states using aggregate and sectoral data and three different modern econometric methods the results which are often contradictory or economically implausible illustrate explicitly that one should be cautious when drawing policy implications with the aid of bivariate causality tests on small samples i therefore underline the importance of utilizing as large sample sizes as possible and using multivariate models which are closer to economic theory accommodate several mechanisms and causality channels and provide a better representation of real world interactions between energy use and economic growth

do consumers react to anticipated income changes evidence from the alaska permanent fund a central implication of the life cycle permanentincome hypothesis lc pih is that consumers should not respond to predictable changes in their income to test this hypothesis a number of recent papers have exploited natural experiments to identify anticipated income changes in particular recent work by parker 1999 uses the change in after tax income due to the cap on earnings subject to the social security tax and a related paper by souleles 1999 examines the response of consumption to income tax refunds surprisingly parker and souleles find that even when income is expected to change within the year expenditure is excessively sensitive to the timing of the income change while their results can be interpreted as evidence that our canonical model of consumption is inadequate an alternative explanation is that the anticipated income changes they exploit are small and irregular and that households will not bother to change their consumption paths when the computational costs involved are large relative to the utility gains in support of this interpretation browning and collado 2001 find that the seasonal consumption patterns of spanish households that work in sectors that provide regular bonus payments do not differ from those of households that do not receive bonus payments this paper adds to this evidence by exploiting a natural experiment provided by annual payments from the state of alaska s permanent fund to every resident in the state of alaska that should yield an unusually powerful test of the lc pih these payments are large and clearly anticipated by alaskan residents using the variation in the size of the payments over time and in the amount received by families of different sizes to identify the response of consumption to payments from the permanent fund i find no evidence that the consumption of alaskan households reacts to these payments in addition i find no evidence that the seasonal pattern of consumption in alaska differs from that in the other 49 states or that households in alaska are subject to fewer liquidity constraints engage in less buffer stock saving or spend a smaller fraction of their income on semidurable goods than households in the rest of the united states however although households in alaska do not overreact to payments from the permanent fund i find that the consumption of the very same households is excessively sensitive to their income tax refunds this evidence suggest that households will take anticipated income changes into account in their consumption decisions when the income changes are large regular and easy to predict but will not do so when they are small and irregular the paper proceeds as follows the next section of the paper presents details on the department of economics princeton university princeton nj 08544 and national bureau of economic research e mail chsieh princeton edu i am very grateful to the bureau of labor statistics bls for providing access to the data from the consumer expenditure survey and to its staff particularly steven henderson walter vandeheide and wolf weber for their generous assistance during my visits to the bls i also thank nanci jones for providing data and patiently answering questions on the operation of the alaska permanent fund anne case angus deaton jonathan parker and two referees provided useful comments the views expressed in this paper are personal and should not be attributed to the bls 1 i refer to the certainty equivalent version of the lc pih or one in which the expected variance of consumption is constant as is well known without these assumptions the lc pih only implies smoothing of marginal utility not necessarily of consumption 2 see christina h paxson 1992 john shea 1995 jonathan a parker 1999 nicholas s souleles 1999 martin browning and m dolores collado 2001 also see ronald a bodkin 1959 for an early example of the use of a natural experiment to test for excess sensitivity for comprehensive reviews of the large literature on empirical tests of the lc pih see angus deaton 1992 browning and annamaria lusardi 1996 and browning and thomas f crossley 2001 3 in 1998 for example the permanent fund paid 1 541 to every resident of the state of alaska

causal relationship between energy consumption and gdp revisited the case of korea 1970 1999 abstract causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is investigated applying a multivariate model of capital labor energy and gdp usual btu energy aggregate is substituted with a divisia aggregate in an attempt to mitigate aggregation bias to test for granger causality in the presence of cointegration among the variables we employ a vector error correction model rather than a vector autoregressive model empirical results for korea over the period 1970 1999 suggest a long run bidirectional causal relationship between energy and gdp and short run unidirectional causality running from energy to gdp the source of causation in the long run is found to be the error correction terms in both directions

electricity consumption and economic growth in china abstract this paper applies the error correction model to examine the causal relationship between electricity consumption and real gdp for china during 1971 2000 our estimation results indicate that real gdp and electricity consumption for china are cointegrated and there is unidirectional granger causality running from electricity consumption to real gdp but not vice versa in order to overcome the constraints on electricity consumption the chinese government has to speed up the nation wide interconnection of power networks to upgrade urban and rural distribution grids and to accelerate rural electrification

electricity consumption and economic growth in china cointegration and co feature analysis abstract this paper applies the cointegration theory to examine the causal relationship between electricity consumption and real gdp gross demostic product for china during 1978 2004 our estimation results indicate that real gdp and electricity consumption for china are cointegrated and there is only unidirectional granger causality running from electricity consumption to real gdp but not the vice versa then hodrick prescott hp filter is applied to decompose the trend and fluctuation component of the gdp and electricity consumption series the estimation results indicate that there is cointegration between not only the trend components but also the cyclical components of the two series which implies that the granger causality is probably related with the business cycle the estimation results are of policy implication to the development of electric sector in china

energy and economic growth in the usa a multivariate approach abstract this paper examines the causal relationship between gdp and energy use for the period 1947 90 in the usa the relationship between energy use and economic growth has been examined by both biophysical and neoclassical economists in particular several studies have tested for the presence of a causal relationship in the granger sense between energy use and economic growth however these tests do not allow a direct test of the relative explanatory powers of the neoclassical and biophysical models a multivariate adaptation of the test vector autoregression var does allow such a test a var of gdp energy use capital stock and employment is estimated and granger tests for causal relationships between the variables are carried out although there is no evidence that gross energy use granger causes gdp a measure of final energy use adjusted for changing fuel composition does granger cause gdp

a note on the causal relationship between energy and gdp in taiwan abstract this paper re examines the causality between energy consumption and gdp by using updated taiwan data for the period 1954 1997 as a secondary contribution we investigate the causal relationship between gdp and the aggregate as well as several disaggregate categories of energy consumption including coal oil natural gas and electricity applying granger s technique we find bidirectional causality between total energy consumption and gdp we find further that different directions of cause exist between gdp and various kinds of energy consumption

excess sensitivity of high income consumers using new transaction data i find considerable deviations from consumption smoothing in response to large regular predetermined and salient payments from the alaska permanent fund on average the marginal propensity to consume mpc is 25 for nondurables and services within one quarter of the payments the mpc is heterogeneous monotonically increasing with income and the average is largely driven by high income households with substantial amounts of liquid assets who have mpcs above 50 the account level data and the properties of the payments rule out most previous explanations of excess sensitivity including buffer stock models and rational inattention how big are these mistakes using a sufficient statistics approach i show that the welfare loss from excess sensitivity depends on the mpc and the relative payment size as a fraction of income since the lump sum payments do not depend on income the two statistics are negatively correlated such that the welfare losses are similar across households and small less than 0 1 of wealth despite the large mpcs

the reaction of consumer spending and debt to tax rebates evidence from consumer credit data we use a new panel data set of credit card accounts to analyze how consumers responded to the 2001 federal income tax rebates we estimate the monthly response of credit card payments spending and debt exploiting the unique randomized timing of the rebate disbursement we find that on average consumers initially saved some of the rebate by increasing their credit card payments and thereby paying down debt but soon afterward their spending increased counter to the permanent income model spending rose most for consumers who were initially most likely to be liquidity constrained whereas debt declined most so saving rose most for unconstrained consumers

can african countries efficiently build their economies on renewable energy abstract the translog production model is estimated to provide insights on the effectiveness of renewable energy for africa the analysis shows that capital labor renewable energy and nonrenewable energy drive output in african countries with renewable energy being a higher driver of growth than the conventional fossil fuels over the sample period this finding is reflective of the fact that renewable sources like wind hydro and solar account for a greater share of power generation in most african countries output elasticities computed for both energy types reaffirm the results and suggest that eastern and central african countries are more renewable energy dependent than the other three regions in addition technological progress is driven mainly by the efficiency with which various factors and energy inputs are used while africa has great potential of facing out conventional fossil energy the discussion provided in this study suggests that such transition is limited in practice due to issues of scale economics and sitting problems

natural gas consumption and economic development in china and japan an empirical examination of the asian context abstract this paper examined the relationship between natural gas consumption and economic development in two largest natural gas consumers in asia namely china and japan for the period of 1980 2012 it used the autoregressive distributed lags ardl method for the empirical analysis the findings revealed some similarities in the natural gas consumption and economic development nexus in china and japan thus a cointegration relationship between natural gas consumption and economic development was found to exist both in china and japan however there was an important difference in the findings in the case of china the findings indicated the existence of a unidirectional causality from natural gas consumption to economic development which was in line with the growth hypothesis in japan there was a bidirectional causality between natural gas consumption and economic development which supported the feedback hypothesis

consumption smoothing after the final mortgage payment testing the magnitude hypothesis we examine whether the magnitude of an anticipated income change affects consumption smoothing the magnitude hypothesis although this hypothesis has been discussed for fifty years we are one of the first to provide formal statistical evidence to support it we consider the natural experiment of an individual s final mortgage payment an anticipated income change and examine how it affects credit card expenditure we can identify causality because the dates of final mortgage payments across individuals are uncorrelated with unobserved determinants of consumption using an event study methodology we provide evidence to support the magnitude hypothesis

the equilibrium relationship among money income prices and interest rates evidence from a threshold cointegration test the long run equilibrium relationship among money income prices and interest rates in japan is investigated by the threshold cointegration test which allows for asymmetric adjustment introduced by enders and siklos 2001 the threshold cointegration approach provides clear evidence of the cointegration relationship characterized by asymmetric adjustment by allowing for asymmetric adjustment results are obtained showing the stability of the money demand function similar to lucas 1988 who pointed out that the money demand function is stable if unit income elasticity is imposed in particular the estimated results show that the adjustment process toward equilibrium is highly persistent above an appropriately estimated threshold whereas the adjustment process toward equilibrium quickly converges below it this finding indicates that deviations from equilibrium resulting from increases in money or decreases in income and prices are highly persistent

disaggregated industrial energy consumption and gdp the case of shanghai 1952 1999 abstract this paper investigates the causal relationship between various kinds of industrial energy consumption and gdp in shanghai for the period 1952 1999 using a modified version of the granger 1969 causality test proposed by toda and yamamoto j econ 66 1995 225 the empirical evidence from disaggregated energy series seems to suggest that there was a uni directional granger causality running from coal coke electricity and total energy consumption to real gdp but no granger causality running in any direction between oil consumption and real gdp

a multivariate cointegration analysis of the role of energy in the us macroeconomy abstract this paper extends my previous analysis of the causal relationship of gdp and energy use in the usa in the post war period a majority of the relevant variables are integrated justifying a cointegration analysis the results show that cointegration does occur and that energy input cannot be excluded from the cointegration space the results are plausible in terms of macroeconomic dynamics the results are similar to my previous granger causality results and contradict claims in the literature based on bivariate models that there is no cointegration between energy and output

energy consumption and economic growth assessing the evidence from greece abstract this paper attempts to shed light into the empirical relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for greece 1960 1996 employing the vector error correction model estimation the vector specification includes energy consumption real gdp and price developments the latter taken to represent a measure of economic efficiency the empirical evidence suggests that there is a long run relationship between the three variables supporting the endogeneity of energy consumption and real output these findings have important policy implications since the adoption of suitable structural policies aiming at improving economic efficiency can induce energy conservation without impeding economic growth

cointegration and causality between electricity consumption and gdp empirical evidence from malawi abstract the granger causality gc and error correction ecm techniques were applied on 1970 1999 data for malawi to examine cointegration and causality between electricity consumption kwh and respectively overall gdp agricultural gdp agdp and non agricultural gdp ngdp cointegration was established between kwh and respectively gdp and ngdp but not with agdp the gc results detect bi directional causality between kwh and gdp suggesting that kwh and gdp are jointly determined but one way causality running from ngdp to kwh the ecm results detect causality running one way from gdp also from ngdp to kwh suggesting that a permanent rise in gdp may cause a permanent growth in electricity consumption

electricity consumption and economic growth evidence from korea abstract this paper investigates the short and long run causality issues between electricity consumption and economic growth in korea by using the co integration and error correction models it employs annual data covering the period 1970 2002 the overall results show that there exists bi directional causality between electricity consumption and economic growth this means that an increase in electricity consumption directly affects economic growth and that economic growth also stimulates further electricity consumption

price and advertising effectiveness over the business cycle abstract firms are under increasing pressure to justify their marketing expenditures this evolution toward greater accountability is reinforced in harsh economic times when marketing budgets are among the first to be reconsidered to make such decisions managers must know whether and to what extent marketing s effectiveness varies with the economic tide however surprisingly little research addresses this issue therefore the authors conduct a systematic investigation of the business cycle s impact on the effectiveness of two important marketing instruments price and advertising to do so they estimate time varying short and long term advertising and price elasticities for 150 brands across 36 consumer packaged goods categories using 18 years of monthly u k data from 1993 to 2010 the long term price sensitivity tends to decrease during economic expansions whereas long term advertising elasticities increase during contractions the long term own and cross price elasticities increase moreover

consumption commitments and habit formation we analyze the implications of household level adjustment costs for the dynamics of aggregate consumption we show that an economy in which agents have consumption commitments is approximately equivalent to a habit formation model in which the habit stock is a weighted average of past consumption if idiosyncratic risk is large relative to aggregate risk consumption commitments can thus explain the empirical regularity that consumption is excessively sensitive and excessively smooth findings that are typically attributed to habit formation unlike habit formation and other theories but consistent with empirical evidence the consumption commitments model also predicts that excess sensitivity and smoothness vanish for large shocks these results suggest that behavior previously attributed to habit formation may be better explained by adjustment costs we develop additional testable predictions to further distinguish the commitment and habit models and show that the two models have different welfare implications

wealth shocks unemployment shocks and consumption in the wake of the great recession we use data from the 2009 internet survey of the health and retirement study to examine the consumption impact of wealth shocks and unemployment during the great recession in the us we find that many households experienced large capital losses in housing and in their financial portfolios and that a non trivial fraction of respondents have lost their job as a consequence of these shocks many households reduced substantially their expenditures we estimate that the marginal propensities to consume with respect to housing and financial wealth are 1 and 3 3 percentage points respectively in addition those who became unemployed reduced spending by 10 percent we also distinguish the effect of perceived transitory and permanent wealth shocks splitting the sample between households who think that the stock market is likely to recover in a year s time and those who don t in line with the predictions of standard models of intertemporal choice we find that the latter group adjusted much more than the former its spending in response to financial wealth shocks

do liquidity constraints and interest rates matter for consumer behavior evidence from credit card data this paper utilizes a unique new dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how people respond to changes in credit supply the data consist of a panel of thousands of individual credit card accounts from several different card issuers with associated credit bureau data we estimate both marginal propensities to consume mpcs out of liquidity and interest rate elasticities we also evaluate the ability of different models of consumption to rationalize our results distinguishing the permanent income hypothesis pih liquidity constraints precautionary saving and behavioral models we find that increases in credit limits generate an immediate and significant rise in debt counter to the pih the average mpc out of liquidity ddebt dlimit ranges between 10 14 the mpc is much larger for people starting near their limits consistent with binding liquidity constraints however the mpc is significant even for people starting well below their limit we show this response is consistent with buffer stock models of precautionary saving nonetheless there are other results that conventional models cannot easily explain e g why so many people are borrowing on their credit cards and simultaneously holding low yielding assets unlike most other studies we also find strong effects from changes in account specific interest rates the long run elasticity of debt to the interest rate is approximately 1 3 less than half of this elasticity represents balance shifting across cards with most reflecting net changes in total borrowing the elasticity is larger for decreases in interest rates than for increases which can explain the widespread use of temporary promotional rates the elasticity is smaller for people starting near their credit limits again consistent with liquidity constraints

energy consumption and economic activities in iran abstract the causal relationship between overall gdp industrial and agricultural value added and consumption of different kinds of energy are investigated using vector error correction model for the case of iran within 1967 2003 a long run unidirectional relationship from gdp to total energy and bidirectional relationship between gdp and gas as well as gdp and petroleum products consumption for the whole economy was discovered causality is running from value added to total energy electricity gas and petroleum products consumption and from gas consumption to value added in industrial sector the long run bidirectional relations hold between value added and total energy electricity and petroleum products consumption in the agricultural sector the short run causality runs from gdp to total energy and petroleum products consumption and also industrial value added to total energy and petroleum products consumption in this sector

electricity consumption and economic growth evidence from turkey abstract this study investigates the causal relationship between electricity consumption and real gdp in turkey during the period of 1950 2000 both of the series were found to be a stationary process around a structural break by the zivot and andrews test thus two different methodologies have been employed to test the granger non causality the dolado lutkepohl test using the vars in levels and the standard granger causality test using the detrended data both tests have yielded a strong evidence for unidirectional causality running from the electricity consumption to the income this implies that the supply of electricity is vitally important to meet the growing electricity consumption hence to sustain the economic growth in turkey

the life cycle model of consumption and saving a central implication of life cycle models is that agents smooth consumption we review the empirical evidence on smoothing at frequencies from within the year up to across a lifetime we find that life cycle models particular those which incorporate realistic features of markets and goods have more empirical successes than failures we also show that some apparent deviations from theoretical predictions imply very small welfare losses for agents finally we emphasize that the coherence of life cycle models imposes an important discipline when incorporating new features into models

bayesian arbitrage threshold analysis a bayesian estimation procedure is developed for estimating multiple regime multiple threshold error correction models appropriate for deviations from financial arbitrage relationships this approach has clear advantages over classical stepwise threshold autoregressive analysis unlike many other applications of threshold models the knowledge of some costs involved in setting up arbitrage positions allows us to specify an informative prior to illustrate the bayesian procedure we estimate a no arbitrage band within which index futures arbitrage is not profitable despite persistent deviations from parity

the response of household consumption to income tax refunds a central implication of the life cycle or permanent income theory is that consumption should not respond to predictable fluctuations in income tests of this implication have yielded mixed results especially on micro data angus deaton 1992 martin browning and annamaria lusardi 1996 in large part this might be due to the difficulties of isolating the predictable component of income at the micro level most tests proceed by instrumenting for income but since the available instruments are typically poor such tests might be prejudiced against finding significant excess sensitivity of consumption to income john shea 1995 also it is not clear how closely the resulting econometric predictions of income coincide with agents actual expectations of income to avoid these difficulties this paper examines the response of household consumption to a particular type of income that is both predictable and transitory income tax refunds since a refund depends on events in the previous calendar year it is predictable income as regards consumption in the year of its receipt consequently under the life cycle theory consumption should not increase on receipt of a refund 2 in addition to testing the canonical model of consumption this paper provides estimates interpretable as the marginal propensity to consume mpc out of refunds since federal tax refunds now amount to over 80 billion per year averaging well over 1 000 per refund these estimates are of interest in themselves more generally they bear on the impact of even preannounced and temporary changes in fiscal policy the paper begins by surveying related studies in section i section ii describes the data the consumer expenditure survey cex which of the leading u s micro data sets has the most comprehensive coverage of expenditure the empirical specification is set out in section hi section iv reports the results and section v concludes

structural breaks energy consumption and economic growth revisited evidence from taiwan abstract this paper studies the stability between energy consumption and gdp for taiwan during 1954 2003 we use aggregate as well as various disaggregate data of energy consumption including coal oil gas and electricity to employ the unit root tests and the cointegration tests allowing for structural breaks our main findings are first though gas consumption seems to have structural breaks in the 1960s after considering the structural breaks the series is a stationary variable when taiwan adopted its expansionary export trade policy second we find that different directions of causality exist between gdp and various kinds of energy consumption the empirical result shows unanimously in the long run that energy acts as an engine of economic growth and that energy conservation may harm economic growth third the cointegration between energy consumption and gdp is unstable and some economic events may affect the stability overall we do find the structural breakpoints and they look to match clearly with the corresponding critical economic incidents

cointegration tests of a long run relation between money demand and the effective exchange rate abstract for the period starting with the floating of the us dollar we find evidence that long run stationarity of the demand function for m2 but not m1 requires inclusion of the effective exchange rate these results lend some support to mckinnon s hypothesis that nonstationarity in the demand for money can be resolved by inclusion of the exchange rate jel f41 e41

the relationship between energy consumption energy prices and economic growth time series evidence from asian developing countries this paper estimates the causal relationships between energy consumption and income for india indonesia the philippines and thailand using cointegration and error correction modelling techniques the results indicate that in the short run unidirectional granger causality runs from energy to income for india and indonesia while bidirectional granger causality runs from energy to income for thailand and the philippines in the case of thailand and the philippines energy income and prices are mutually causal the study results do not support the view that energy and income are neutral with respect to each other with the exception of indonesia and india where neutrality is observed in the short run c 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classifications c22 q43 q48

the electricity consumption and gdp nexus for the fiji islands fiji is a small open island economy dependent on energy for its growth and development hence the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is crucial for fiji s development in this paper we investigate the nexus between electricity consumption and economic growth for fiji within a multivariate framework through including the labour force variable we use the bounds testing approach to cointegration and find that electricity consumption gdp and labour force are only cointegrated when gdp is the endogenous variable we use the granger causality f test and find that in the long run causality runs from electricity consumption and labour force to gdp implying that fiji is an energy dependent country and thus energy conservation policies will have an adverse effect on fiji s economic growth

energy consumption and gdp in turkey is there a co integration relationship energy consumption and gdp are expected to grow by 5 9 and 7 annually until 2025 in turkey this paper tries to unfold the linkage between energy consumption and gdp by undertaking a co integration analysis for turkey with annual data over the period 1970 2003 the analysis shows that energy consumption and gdp are co integrated this means that there is a possibly bi directional causality relationship between the two we establish that there is a unidirectional causality running from gdp to energy consumption indicating that energy saving would not harm economic growth in turkey in addition we find that energy consumption keeps on growing as long as the economy grows in turkey

energy use and output growth in canada a multivariate cointegration analysis using a neo classical one sector aggregate production technology where capital labor and energy are treated as separate inputs this paper develops a vector error correction vec model to test for the existence and direction of causality between output growth and energy use in canada using the johansen cointegration technique the empirical findings indicate that the long run movements of output labor capital and energy use in canada are related by two cointegrating vectors then using a vec specification the short run dynamics of the variables indicate that granger causality is running in both directions between output growth and energy use hence an important policy implication of the analysis is that energy can be considered as a limiting factor to output growth in canada

is there a retirement savings puzzle in this paper we ask whether households are saving enough for their retirement we use data on income expenditure and expenditure components to analyse patterns of behaviour at and around the time of retirement for successive date of birth cohorts we compare periods of unemployment to periods of retirement and separate expenditures into categories reflecting work related expenditures basic necessities and other goods we find that income typically falls by more at unemployment than retirement but the reverse is true for expenditure we observe falls in expenditure at retirement for all expenditure categories using a stochastic life cycle model including mortality rates we assess the anticipated impact of retirement on consumption against that of unemployment the inter relationship between goods and leisure explains a large part of the persistent fall in expenditure at retirement we argue that the only way in which the life cycle hypothesis could be reconciled with the remaining unanticipated dip in consumption would be with the systematic arrival of unexpected adverse information at the time of retirement