the impact of ict investment and energy price on industrial electricity demand dynamic growth model approach the authors investigate the effects of information and communications technology ict investment electricity price and oil price on the consumption of electricity in south korea s industries using a logistic growth model the concept electricity intensity is used to explain electricity consumption patterns an empirical analysis implies that ict investment in manufacturing industries that normally consume relatively large amounts of electricity promotes input factor substitution away from the labor intensive to the electricity intensive moreover results also suggest that ict investment in some specific manufacturing sectors is conducive to the reduction of electricity consumption whereas ict investment in the service sector and most manufacturing sectors increases electricity consumption it is concluded that electricity prices critically affect electricity consumption in half of south korea s industrial sectors but not in the other half a finding that differs somewhat from previous research results reasons are suggested to explain why the south korean case is so different policymakers may find this study useful as it answers the question of whether ict investment can ultimately reduce energy consumption and may aid in planning the capacity of south korea s national electric power

testing the long run implications of the neoclassical growth model abstract the long run implications of the one factor neoclassical growth model are tested by investigating the cointegrating relations between the log of output consumption and investment and the real interest rate with the exceptions of austria and the united kingdom the evidence for the united states and to a lesser extent for canada japan and the federal republic of germany is favorable to the neoclassical growth model a simple extension to a multicountry setting proved however to be unsuccessful national outputs nor consumption series are driven by just one common stochastic trend

evidence from an experiment on charity to welfare recipients reciprocity altruism and the empathic responsiveness hypothesis this article investigates the determinants of generosity in an experiment on charity to real life welfare recipients it tests the effects of various measures of unconditional altruism and conditional or reciprocal altruism the results show strong support for conditional or reciprocal altruism however people who are self reported unconditional altruists make offers that are highly elastic with respect to the apparent worthiness of the recipient one interpretation of this is that self reported unconditional altruists have combined desires to help others and to reciprocate unconditional altruism and reciprocal altruism may not be independent motives i refer to this combination as empathic responsiveness

government spending the balance of trade and the terms of trade in british history abstract this paper investigates the relationship between government spending the balance of trade and the terms of trade using early british data a large open economy intertemporal framework in which ricardian equivalence holds predicts a larger effect of temporary government spending changes on the trade deficit than permanent ones further a pure switch between debt and taxes should have no effect on trade flows the results provide some support for these hypotheses although they are sensitive to sample period and the method of decomposition of government spending a negative relationship between government spending and the terms of trade is also found

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

weak exogeneity and long run and contemporaneous identifying restrictions in vec models abstract this paper shows that under the king et al 1991 approach kpsw 1991 stochastic trends and economic fluctuations american economic review 81 819 840 to structural identification in vec models the structural shocks with transitory effects do not have a contemporaneous impact on the weakly exogenous variables this result is used to establish the conditions under which the kpsw and sims 1980 identification schemes macroeconomics and reality econometrica 48 1 48 are equivalent in a model of us consumption investment and private output

modeling the co movements between crude oil and refined petroleum markets abstract in this paper we investigate two types of asymmetries i e the asymmetry in the lower and upper tail dependences and the asymmetry in the propagation of crisis bubble between crude oil market and refined petroleum markets based on copula models thirteen copula models with different types of dependence structures and time varying dependence parameters are considered we find that in general the malm copula fits our sample data best based on aic criterion we find that lower and upper tail dependences are both positive indicating that crude oil and refined product markets tend to move together using the asymmetric copulas we find asymmetry in tail dependence between crude oil and heating oil returns and that between crude oil and jet fuel returns interestingly upper tail dependence is significantly greater than the lower tail dependence for the pre crisis period while the result is reversed for the post crisis period finally although our data prefers the nonexchangeable malm copula the asymmetry in the propagation of crisis bubble between crude oil and refined product returns is very weak

the long and short of money short run dynamics within a structural model empirical examinations into aggregate money demand functions generally incorporate a monetary aggregate as the dependent variable while this custom may be inefficient it does not create any new difficulties for estimating the demand function s long run parameters as money supply would equal money demand the short run estimates however are not as fortunate as the monetary aggregate is a measure of supply and not demand one needs to tease out the short run responses associated with money demand changes with those which are associated with monetary supply shocks the present article therefore proposes a more complete representation of monetary sector behaviour and in doing so finds significant support for the so called buffer stock money demand models

international evidence on the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations abstract this paper examines the causes of macroeconomic fluctuations in five economies germany japan sweden the united kingdom and the united states using a bivariate var model for output and inflation the results demonstrate that both demand and supply shocks are important sources of business cycle fluctuations moreover at the business cycle frequency there are strong similarities between germany the united kingdom and the united states where more than 50 percent of the forecast error variance in both output and inflation are due to supply shocks on the other hand in japan and sweden over 90 percent of the error variance in output and less than 20 percent of the error variance of inflation are due to supply shocks

corporate credit stock price inflation and economic fluctuations this study analyses the empirical interaction between real corporate credit real income real stock prices the short term interest rate and inflation for the netherlands and the usa the framework is based on a five variable structural vector error correction model which identifies the permanent and temporary shocks within the system erratic shocks in the real amount of corporate credit and in stock prices could potentially have some impact on inflation in the case of the usa and on real output in the netherlands however the structural var analysis also shows that the above mentioned erratic shocks only explain a small proportion of the variation in inflation and economic activity and inflation objective shifts and supply side shocks are much more important determinants for economic fluctuations

income and price elasticities of energy consumption in egypt a time series analysis abstract the purpose of this paper is to provide empirical estimates of the price and income elasticities of energy consumption in egypt it fills an important gap since policy discussion of energy pricing issues has so far been based more on assumptions than on hard evidence the paper shows that the real relative price of energy has been falling steadily since 1972 while per capita energy consumption rose some 50 over the decade 1972 81 evidence produced in this exercise indicates quite clearly that price and income elasticities of energy consumption are significantly much lower than was generally believed

should investors include commodities in their portfolios after all new evidence abstract this paper investigates whether an investor is made better off by including commodities in a portfolio that consists of traditional asset classes first we revisit the posed question within an in sample setting by employing mean variance and non mean variance spanning tests then we form optimal portfolios by taking into account the higher order moments of the portfolio returns distribution and evaluate their out of sample performance under the in sample setting we find that commodities are beneficial only to non mean variance investors however these benefits are not preserved out of sample our findings challenge the alleged diversification benefits of commodities and are robust across a number of performance evaluation measures utility functions and datasets the results hold even when transaction costs are considered and across various sub periods not surprisingly the only exception appears over the 2005 2008 unprecedented commodity boom period

distinguishing trust from risk an anatomy of the investment game the role of trust in promoting economic activity and societal development has received considerable academic attention by social scientists a popular way to measure trust at the individual level is the so called investment game berg dickhaut and mccabe 1995 it has been widely noted however that risk attitudes can also affect decisions in this game and thus in principle confound inferences about trust we provide novel evidence shedding light on the role of risk attitudes for trusting decisions to the best of our knowledge our data are the first rigorous evidence that i aggregate investment distributions differ significantly between trust and risk environments and ii risk attitudes predict individual investment decisions in risk games but not in the corresponding trust games our results are convergent evidence that trust decisions are not tightly connected to a person s risk attitudes and they lend support to the trust interpretation of decisions in investment games

a note on the conditional correlation between energy prices evidence from future markets abstract we model the joint movements of daily returns on one month futures for crude oil heating oil and natural gas through the multivariate garch with dynamic conditional correlations and elliptical distributions introduced by pelagatti and rondena pelagatti m m rondena s 2007 dynamic conditional correlation with elliptical distributions unpublished manuscript universita di milano bicocca august futures prices of crude and heating oil covary strongly the conditional correlation between the futures prices of natural gas and crude oil has been rising over the last 5 years however this correlation has been low on average over two thirds of the sample suggesting that future markets have no established tradition of pricing natural gas as a function of developments on oil markets

unemployment and the business cycle in a small open economy g m m estimation and testing with french data abstract what is a relevant model for the european business cycle in this paper the empirical performances of three models are compared a canonical walrasian r b c framework its extension to the case of a small open economy and a version of this model with search and wage bargaining on the labor market structural parameters of the models are estimated using g m m and their abilities to reproduce the french business cycle taken as representative of the european business cycle are tested only the small open economy with unemployment is able to generate theoretical moments that match their empirical counterparts

setor agricola brasileiro uma aplicacao do modelo de tendencias e ciclos comuns no periodo de 1990 a 2005 the present study analyzes the behavior of agricultural gdp real exchange rate and the current account balance agricultural in brazil during the period of 1990 to 2005 cointegration techniques were used to identify a var system with common stochastic trends and to investigate the system responses to transitories and permanent shocks the tests had proven the existence of a common trend and two cycles between the variables variance decomposition indicates that transiotories shocks account form most of the short and long run fluctuations in agricultural gdp it was found that permanent shocks explain most of the variance of the exchange rate and of the current account balance mainly in the long run

the fuelwood market in greece an empirical approach abstract wood has been since ancient times the basic household heating medium nowadays wood remains the primary energy source in rural areas of developing countries mainly in africa in greece the domestic demand of fuelwood is relied mainly on the fuelwood domestic supply especially during the post war period the domestic supply satisfies adequately the domestic demand eliminating the role of imports the present study surveys the long run relationship between the fuelwood prices of different forest species in order to determine the role of the special market conditions in their price formation in addition the error correction model is estimated in order to survey the direction of the granger causality among the prices of the fuelwood forest species the implementation of the impulse response analysis and the variance decomposition confirmed that coniferous and beech fuelwood producer price may account for the volatility of the oak fuelwood producer price this result may contribute greatly to the conservation of oak forest an important carbon storage forest ecosystem

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

markov switching stochastic trends and economic fluctuations abstract i investigate cointegrating relationships such that even though the long run attractors are assumed to be linear the dynamics of the equilibrium errors depends on the business cycle i postulate a markov switching common stochastic trends model to study both the short run responses to permanent shocks and the effects of recessions in the long run growth i apply these findings to explore the short and long run asymmetric relationships among output consumption and investment

price sensitivity of residential energy consumption in norway abstract the main aim of this paper is to test the stability of the results of a model which focus on the relationship between the choice of heating equipment and the residential energy consumption the results for the income and energy price variables are of special interest stability in the time dimension is tested by applying the model on micro data for each of the years 1993 1995 the parameter estimates are stable within a 95 confidence interval however the estimated impact of the energy price variable on energy consumption was considerably weaker in 1994 than in 1993 and 1995 the results for two different income groups in the pooled data set are also subject to stability testing the energy price sensitivity in residential energy consumption is found to be higher for high income households than for low income households

some consequences of temporal aggregation in empirical analysis i derive the generating mechanism of a temporally aggregated process when the disaggregated one belongs to the vector autoregressive integrated moving average class i then study the effects of temporal aggregation on a set of characteristics of usual interest such as exogeneity causality cointegration and common features an empirical example with canadian interest rates illustrates the main issues

non linear prices and energy demand abstract this paper examines the use of non linear price structures in the context of the demand for energy such structures are attractive because they permit policy makers to meet the objective of equity without sacrificing that of resource mobilization and economic efficiency the paper concentrates on two aspects of this issue the first is the accurate forecasting of demand in the presence of such price structures and the second is the design of the optimal non linear tariff given some suitable welfare loss minimizing criterion in addition to looking at the theoretical aspects of the problem the paper also has some illustrative results on forecasting demand with non linear electricity tariffs in pakistan

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

simulation based tests of forward looking models under var learning dynamics in this paper we propose a simulation based technique to investigate the finite sample performance of likelihood ratio lr tests for the nonlinear restrictions that arise when a class of forward looking fl models typically used in monetary policy analysis is evaluated with vector autoregressive var models we consider one shot tests to evaluate the fl model under the rational expectations hypothesis and sequences of tests obtained under the adaptive learning hypothesis the analysis is based on a comparison between the unrestricted and restricted var likelihoods and the p values associated with the lr test statistics are computed by monte carlo simulation we also address the case where the variables of the fl model can be approximated as non stationary cointegrated processes application to the hybrid new keynesian phillips curve nkpc in the euro area shows that i the forward looking component of inflation dynamics is much larger than the backward looking component and ii the sequence of restrictions implied by the cointegrated nkpc under learning dynamics is not rejected over the monitoring period 1984 2005 copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

aggregate industrial energy consumer response to wholesale prices in the restructured texas electricity market abstract the aggregate response of consumers to wholesale price signals is very limited in the restructured electric reliability council of texas ercot market an overall average own price elasticity of demand of 0 000008 for industrial energy consumers served at transmission voltage is estimated using a symmetric generalized mcfadden cost function model to date ercot has sought to promote demand response to price signals without reliance on stand alone demand response programs but with a market structure that is designed to facilitate economic demand response this very limited responsiveness to wholesale price signals may prove problematic in light of policy decisions to pursue an energy only resource adequacy mechanism for ercot

dynamics of oil price precious metal prices and exchange rate this study examines the co movements and information transmission among the spot prices of four precious metals gold silver platinum and palladium oil price and the us dollar euro exchange rate we find evidence of a weak long run equilibrium relationship but strong feedbacks in the short run the spot precious metal markets respond significantly but temporarily to a shock in any of the prices of the other metal prices and the exchange rate furthermore we discover some evidence of market overreactions in the palladium and platinum cases as well as in the exchange rate market in conclusion whether there are overreactions and re adjustments or not investors may diversify at least a portion of the risk away by investing in precious metals oil and the euro policy implications are provided

atheoretical macroeconometrics a critique abstract the spurious nature of the restrictions used to identify many macroeconometric models has led some researchers to advocate a style of econometric inquiry that is less dependent on prior theoretical restrictions of the sort that were central to the approach of the cowles commission this development which we call atheoretical macroeconometrics is summarized and evaluated in the current paper it is contrasted with an updated version of the cowles commission approach we conclude that while some of the exercises of atheoretical macroeconometrics are valid those that have attracted the most attention and appear the most innovative exogeneity testing impulse response analysis and policy analysis using estimated vector autoregressions are based on incorrect analysis

dependence and extreme dependence of crude oil and natural gas prices with applications to risk management abstract in this article we show how the copula garch approach can be appropriately used to investigate the conditional dependence structure between the crude oil and natural gas markets as well as to derive implications for portfolio risk management in extreme economic conditions using daily price data from january 1997 to october 2011 our in sample results show evidence of asymmetric dependence between the two markets the crude oil and gas markets tend to comove closely together during bullish periods but not at all during bearish periods moreover taking the extreme comovement into account leads to an improvement in the accuracy of the out of sample value at risk forecasts

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations are business cycles mainly the result of permanent shocks to productivity this paper uses a long run restriction implied by a large class of real business cycle models identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trend in output consumption and investment to provide new evidence on this question econometric tests indicate that this common stochastic trend cointegration implication is consistent with postwar u s data however in systems with nominal variables the estimates of this common stochastic trend indicate that permanent productivity shocks typically explain less than half of the business cycle variability in output consumption and investment copyright 1991 by american economic association

the short and long run efficiency of energy precious metals and base metals markets evidence from the exponential smooth transition autoregressive models abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate the long and short run relationship between spot and futures prices of the energy precious metals and base metals markets we analyze daily data from january 1985 to february 2019 the empirical findings based on the cointegration test which follows a nonlinear process suggest that the spot prices of energy and metals assets have long run relationships with their futures prices nonparametric granger causality test results also indicate bi directional causality among futures and spot prices these findings indicate that the energy and metals markets are informationally efficient in the sense of fama 1970

on the short and long run efficiency of energy and precious metal markets this article contributes to the related literature by empirically investigating the efficiency of nine energy and precious metal markets over the last decades employing several pronounced models we test for both short and the long run efficiency using in addition to linear cointegration models nonlinear cointegration and error correction models ecms which allow the efficiency intensity to change per regime our findings can be summarized as follows i futures prices are found to be cointegrated with spot prices but they do not constitute unbiased predictors of future spot prices ii the hypothesis of risk neutrality is rejected iii the short run efficiency hypothesis is rejected suggesting that using past futures price returns improves the modeling and forecasting of future spot prices and iv the nonlinear modeling suggests the presence of two distinct regimes wherein the first regime the efficiency hypothesis is supported whereas in the second it is rejected the empirical findings have important implications for producers hedgers speculators and policymakers

are real wages and unemployment related in this paper we propose an alternative method for investigating the sources behind the behaviour of real wages and unemployment the model we study is a certain cointegrated var a so called common trends model which has become increasingly popular in the empirical growth business cycle literature this model leads us to emphasize the distinction between long run and short run relations using quarterly swedish data 1965 90 we find only weak evidence of a short run relation between real wages and unemployment as reported in traditional single equation error correction models there is even less evidence of a long run relation

sources of international business fluctuations country specific shocks or worldwide shocks abstract this paper identifies sources of business fluctuations in a two country open economy model with the structural var method focusing on the relative importance of worldwide shocks and country specific shocks unlike previous studies which define country specific shocks as labor supply shocks this study explicitly identifies three kinds of permanent shocks worldwide shocks domestic country specific shocks and foreign country specific shocks with identifying restrictions derived from a theoretical model the main finding is that u s country specific shocks are the most important in explaining u s and foreign output fluctuations except in the short run

what drives us foreign borrowing evidence on external adjustment to transitory and permanent shocks the joint dynamics of us net output consumption and valuation adjusted foreign assets and liabilities characterized empirically following lettau and ludvigson 2004 is shown to be strikingly consistent with current account theory while us consumption is virtually insulated from transitory shocks these contribute considerably to the variation in net output and even more so in gross foreign positions arguably smoothing temporary variations in returns a single permanent shock naturally interpreted as a productivity shock raises consumption swiftly while causing net output to adjust only gradually this leads to persistent procyclical external deficits but interestingly moves gross assets and liabilities in the same direction

contribution of crude oil price to households budget the weight of indirect energy use we propose a new method to evaluate the burden of oil price on any set of goods and services and apply it to french households this method takes into account the contribution of indirect energy consumption which constitutes typically one half of the energy used by a typical french household it yields an average burden of 4 4 in 2006 with a higher relative burden for households with lower income older members and rural dwelling

modelling oecd industrial energy demand asymmetric price responses and energy saving technical change abstract the industrial sector embodies a multifaceted production process consequently modelling the derived demand for energy is a complex issue made all the more difficult by the need to capture the effect of technical progress of the capital stock this paper is an exercise in econometric modelling of industrial energy demand using panel data for 15 oecd countries over the period 1962 2003 exploring the issue of energy saving technical change and asymmetric price responses although difficult to determine precisely it is tentatively concluded that the preferred specification for oecd industrial energy demand incorporates asymmetric price responses but not exogenous energy saving technical change

stated social behavior and revealed actions evidence from six latin american countries abstract do attitudinal surveys and incentivized experiments predict actual behavior we answer this question using data on trust and pro sociality from experiments and surveys conducted on six latin american cities individuals in agreement with a set of pro social statements who also either are willing to trust others more or are interested in risk pooling end up investing more in maintaining their social capital in the form of social organizations such as charities religion politics sports and culture both experiments and surveys carry useful information to understand motivations and intentions in pro social behavior and social capital formation

participatory accountability and collective action experimental evidence from albania it has been argued that accountability is a public good that only citizens can provide governments can put institutions in place that allow citizens to hold public servants to account but citizens must participate in those institutions if accountability is to be achieved thus citizens face a social dilemma participate in holding public servants to account at a cost in terms of time and effort or free ride i e do not participate while benefiting from the efforts of those who do if this characterization of accountability is valid we would expect more cooperatively inclined citizens to participate in accountability institutions while the less cooperatively inclined do not we test the validity of this characterization by investigating the correlation between individual behavior in a simple public goods game and their participation in local and national accountability institutions in albania we involve a nationally representative sample of 1800 adults with children in primary school we find significant correlations between cooperativeness and participation in school accountability institutions and national elections both at the individual level and the district level these correlations are robust to the introduction of many controls in the analysis and in the case of national elections to the use of official election turn out statistics in place of self reported turn out

the price stability oriented monetary policy of the ecb an assessment the definition of price stability adopted by the ecb has recently been criticized in the literature particularly for being unable to fully anchor inflation expectations and creating a deflation risk in the paper empirical evidence is provided against these claims despite the unfavourable macroeconomic conditions for the euro area since 2001 monetary policy management has lead to the setting of the policy rate at levels compatible with trend inflation the long run inflation forecast in the range 1 3 and therefore without affecting negatively the inflation outlook

liberalisation consumption heterogeneity and the dynamics of energy prices in this study the methodology var and the cointegration analysis are used to examine the dynamic interaction among the energy prices of the competitor energy sources in a liberalised market data from the uk market were applied and models for the residential and industrial sectors were developed our results indicate the existence of long run relationships between the energy prices before and after the liberalisation implying the possibility of substitution among the different forms of energy however the results appear to be also largely influenced by external variables not included in the models that may be reducing the importance of the energy prices over their own evolution and offsetting the basic substitution relationships the general results of the impulse response functions both for the residential and industrial sectors present low statistical significance which seems to be due to the still slow rate of adjustment of the energy market to price changes along with the immaturity of the liberalisation process taking into consideration the results some routes for future research are pointed out namely the need to include in the analysis variables which would proxy the general state of the economy

high yields the spread on german interest rates this paper is a first attempt at evaluating the determinants of the interest rate differentials on government bonds between high yielders namely italy spain and sweden and germany in particular we concentrate on daily frequencies where the relevance of economic fundamentals is rather limited and address the question of the relative importance of local and global factors in the determination of such spread we identify and measure three components of total yield differentials one due to expectations of exchange rate depreciation which we call the exchange rate factor another which reflects the market assessment of default risk and a last one due to the different taxation treatment of long term yields

net foreign asset positions and consumption dynamics in the international economy we examine the effect of non zero steady state foreign assets on consumption dynamics in response to productivity shocks in a two country dynamic general equilibrium model the model generates non zero steady state net foreign assets by allowing for different discount factors across countries as a consequence of discounting differences individual steady state consumption profiles are tilted upward or downward worldwide shocks to long run productivity levels lead to dynamics that are absent in standard symmetric models with equal discount factors we then compare the model results to those of a var in common trend representation for the u s versus the rest of the g7 in the data we find that permanent worldwide productivity shocks lead to net foreign asset and consumption dynamics that are broadly consistent with interpreting the u s as the relatively impatient model economy and are not consistent with symmetric models with equal discount factors

the relationship among energy prices and energy consumption in china the pricing mechanism for energy is not in line with the international standards because the energy prices are controlled by the government partly or completely in china chinese government made a lot of efforts to improve the pricing mechanism for energy the relations between chinese energy prices and energy consumption are the foundations to reform the mechanism in this paper the relations between chinese energy consumption and energy prices are researched by cointegration equations impulse response functions granger causality and variance decomposition the cointegration relations among energy prices energy consumption and economic outputs show that higher energy price will decrease energy consumption in chinese industrial sectors but will not reduce the economic output in the long run the cointegration relation between energy price and household energy consumption shows that higher energy price will decrease household energy consumption in the long run and increase it in the short run so chinese government should deepen the reform of pricing mechanism for energy and increase the energy prices reasonably to save energy

impulse response analysis of cointegrated systems abstract impulse response or dynamic multiplier analysis of vector autoregressive systems with cointegrated variables is considered the asymptotic distribution of the responses estimated with johansen s 1988 maximum likelihood procedure is derived the results are illustrated with an analysis of a west german money demand system the investigation shows that a direct interpretation of the cointegration relations may be difficult or misleading thereby the virtue of impulse response analysis for applied work is illustrated

empirical assessment of energy price policies the case for cross price elasticities abstract evaluations of energy price policies are necessarily based on measures of the substitution of energy and non energy inputs facing a variety of substitution elasticities the central question arises which measure would be appropriate apparently for a long time this question has not been at issue allen s elasticities of substitution aes have been the most used measures in applied production analysis this paper s main contribution is an instructive survey of the origin of substitution measures and of the trinity of empirical substitution elasticities aes cross price elasticities and the morishima elasticities of substitution mes with particular emphasis on their interpretations and the perspectives that will be captured by these measures this survey clarifies why classical cross price elasticities are to be preferred for many practical purposes berndt and wood s rev econom stat 57 1975 259 frequently applied data set of us manufacturing is used to illustrate why assessments of energy price policies would be better based on cross price elasticities like the energy price elasticity of capital rather than on aes or mes

a new statistic and practical guidelines for nonparametric granger causality testing abstract in this paper we introduce a new nonparametric test for granger non causality which avoids the over rejection observed in the frequently used test proposed by hiemstra and jones 1994 testing for linear and nonlinear granger causality in the stock price volume relation journal of finance 49 1639 1664 after illustrating the problem by showing that rejection probabilities under the null hypothesis may tend to one as the sample size increases we study the reason behind this phenomenon analytically it turns out that the hiemstra jones test for the null of granger non causality which can be rephrased in terms of conditional independence of two vectors x and z given a third vector y is sensitive to variations in the conditional distributions of x and z that may be present under the null to overcome this problem we replace the global test statistic by an average of local conditional dependence measures by letting the bandwidth tend to zero at appropriate rates the variations in the conditional distributions are accounted for automatically based on asymptotic theory we formulate practical guidelines for choosing the bandwidth depending on the sample size we conclude with an application to historical returns and trading volumes of the standard and poor s index which indicates that the evidence for volume granger causing returns is weaker than suggested by the hiemstra jones test

building social capital conditional cash transfers and cooperation abstract many conditional cash transfer cct programs have important social components and therefore can have an effect on social capital in 2007 we conducted a field experiment with 1451 subjects in cartagena colombia we interpret the behavior in the game as a measure of what in the literature has been called social capital we played the game in two similar and adjacent neighborhoods the treatment neighborhood pozon had been targeted for over 2 years by a cct program familias en accion the control neighborhood cienaga had not in 2008 with the program being implemented in both neighborhoods we played the same public goods game and were therefore able to implement a difference in differences strategy to estimate the impact of the cct on our measure of social capital in 2007 the level of cooperation we observed in the treatment neighborhood was considerably higher than that in the control one although similar in many dimensions the two groups turned out to be significantly different in some observable variables the positive result was robust to controls for these differences in 2008 we found that the level of cooperation was statistically identical across the two neighborhoods and similar to the levels observed in 2007 in the treatment one we conclude that the cct program did improve cooperation in analyzing the effect of the cct on cooperation we also look at other individual and group determinants of individual behavior in the game and we compare our measure based on behavior in the game to more traditional measures of social capital used in the literature that we collected in a context specific survey

world oil and agricultural commodity prices evidence from nonlinear causality abstract the increasing co movements between the world oil and agricultural commodity prices have renewed interest in determining price transmission from oil prices to those of agricultural commodities this study extends the literature on the oil agricultural commodity prices nexus which particularly concentrates on nonlinear causal relationships between the world oil and three key agricultural commodity prices corn soybeans and wheat to this end the linear causality approach of toda yamamoto and the nonparametric causality method of diks panchenko are applied to the weekly data spanning from 1994 to 2010 the linear causality analysis indicates that the oil prices and the agricultural commodity prices do not influence each other which supports evidence on the neutrality hypothesis in contrast the nonlinear causality analysis shows that i there are nonlinear feedbacks between the oil and the agricultural prices and ii there is a persistent unidirectional nonlinear causality running from the oil prices to the corn and to the soybeans prices the findings from the nonlinear causality analysis therefore provide clues for better understanding the recent dynamics of the agricultural commodity prices and some policy implications for policy makers farmers and global investors this study also suggests the directions for future studies

testing for linear and nonlinear granger causality in the stock price volume relation linear and nonlinear granger causality tests are used to examine the dynamic relation between daily dow jones stock returns and percentage changes in new york stock exchange trading volume we find evidence of significant bidirectional nonlinear causality between returns and volume we also examine whether the nonlinear causality from volume to returns can be explained by volume serving as a proxy for information flow in the stochastic process generating stock return variance as suggested by clark s 1973 latent common factor model after controlling for volatility persistence in returns we continue to find evidence of nonlinear causality from volume to returns

renewable energy consumption co2 emissions and oil prices in the g7 countries abstract economic and societal issues related to energy security and global warming is placing greater emphasis on the consumption of renewable energy this paper presents and estimates an empirical model of renewable energy consumption for the g7 countries panel cointegration estimates show that in the long term increases in real gdp per capita and co2 per capita are found to be major drivers behind per capita renewable energy consumption these results are robust across two different panel cointegration estimators oil price increases have a smaller although negative impact on renewable energy consumption deviations from equilibrium are driven mostly by the error correction term as opposed to short term shocks short term deviations from the long term equilibrium take anywhere from between 1 3 years france and 7 3 years japan to correct

price elasticities policy measures and actual developments in household energy consumption a bottom up analysis for the netherlands in the netherlands it seems likely that the large number of new policy measures in the past decade has influenced the response of households to changing prices to investigate this issue the energy trends in the period 1990 2000 have been simulated with a bottom up model applied earlier for scenario studies and extensive data from surveys for a number of alternative price cases the elasticity values found are explained using the bottom up changes in energy trends one finding is that the specific set of saving options defines for a great part the price response the price effect has been analysed too in combination with the policy measures standards subsidies and energy taxes the simulation results indicate that the elasticity value could be 30 40 higher without these measures

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations in a large open economy abstract this study examines the role of stochastic trends in real exchange rates and foreign output in explaining economic fluctuations in the united states while many of the results are consistent with recent closed economy studies the evidence shows that external shocks have significant short run effects on economic fluctuations even in a large country a real appreciation of the dollar leads to permanent decreases in net exports and temporary decreases in output permanent shocks to real exchange rates have surprisingly large effects on output over the course of the normal business cycle

energy price impacts modelling in the agriculture sector abstract energy price impacts in the agriculture sector are mainly of economic and non economic types however economic impacts are well researched this paper surveys the various types of energy price impacts and different estimation techniques used in the past the study suggests that the energy price impacts estimation from a systems model of the agriculture sector is the best for several reasons for this purpose a price endogenous sectoral programming model of agriculture can be developed in a partial or general equilibrium framework however data requirements for this are enormous

the common trend and transitory dynamics in real exchange rate fluctuations this study examines the behaviour of both common trend ct and transitory components of real exchange rate rer fluctuations under the current float the ct component is in most cases found to be sizeable albeit its relative importance can vary considerably across major currencies and its estimate can be sensitive to whether or not long run purchasing power parity ppp is imposed on the data further analysis suggests that both ct and transitory innovations are linked much more to interest rate changes than to productivity changes accordingly it is interest rate not productivity disturbances that drive the highly persistent rer

energy consumption employment output and temporal causality evidence from taiwan based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques in this study a cointegration analysis and a vector autoregressive model var are used to examine the causal relationships among energy consumption employment and output for taiwan over the period january 1982 to november 1997 johansen 1988 and johansen and juselius 1990 cointegration test result indicates these three variables are cointegrated with one cointegrating vector the results from granger causality tests based on vector error correction models vecm suggest bidirectional grange causality for employment output and employment energy consumption but only unidirectional causality running from energy consumption to output furthermore the impulse responses and variance decompositions are also incorporated into the analysis the results from impulsive response and variance decomposition analysis tell similar stories energy consumption appears to have led to output growth in taiwan over this period the policy implication of this finding is that energy conservation will restrain the outpu

identification long run relations and fundamental innovations in a simple cointegrated system this paper examines the roles played by innovations identified from a simple four variable var characterized by cointegration using knowledge of cointegration rank and textbook relations that link macroeconomic aggregates we identify distinct real and nominal innovations that dictate the long run behavior of the model we also examine the explanatory power of transitory innovations that are orthogonal to these permanent shocks one of the permanent shocks displays all the characteristics of a technology or supply innovation while one of the transitory innovations identified by imposing short run price rigid ity is interpretable as a demand side impulse the permanent nominal shock bears the imprint of an innovation in aggregate inflation expectations historical decomposition and comparison with variables that are external to the model reveals the relative importance of the shocks at various episodes

are gold and silver cointegrated new evidence from quantile cointegrating regressions this paper revisits the study on the long run relationship between gold and silver by escribano and granger 1998 we apply a quantile cointegration model to gold and silver prices and to prices of the corresponding futures contracts whereas cointegration models assuming a constant cointegrating vector fail to detect a cointegration relationship between gold and silver we are able to show that a nonlinear long run relationship exits the cointegrating vector is modelled as state dependent and time varying in our framework and the quantile cointegration estimates reveal substantial asymmetry in the relationship the results suggest that the pronounced role of precious metals as investment opportunities particularly in bubble like episodes and times of financial turmoil leads to comovement of gold and silver in these periods

swedish postwar business cycles generated abroad or at home the relative importance of foreign and domestic shocks for the swedish postwar business cycle is examined in a neoclassical stochastic growth model of a small open economy since recent research has shown that fiscal policy shocks may be important for business cycles i extend previous work in the literature by allowing for stochastic fiscal policy it is found that the introduction of fiscal policy improves the empirical fit of the model although not significantly so when hours worked are detrended with the hp filter the results suggest that domestic shocks are more important than foreign shocks for output fluctuations among the domestic shocks innovations in fiscal policy seem to have been more important than technology shocks during this period foreign shocks are very important for fluctuations in the real exchange rate and the current account

sweden s relative economic performance lagging behind or staying on top the purpose of this papers is confined to illuminating the aspect has sewedish economic growth been slow relative to other industrialised countries in recent decades i e is sweden lagging behind this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

sources of real exchange rate fluctuations in the nordic countries in an attempt to move beyond the purchasing power parity hypothesis this paper addresses two issues the first concerns the causes of movements in real exchange rates in contrast to the typical result supply shocks are found to dominate the long run variance decompositions for each of the four nordic countries under study this suggests that productivity developments are the most important determinant of long run movements in real exchange rates a second topic is the relative importance of stationary and non stationary components of real exchange rates also in contrast to previous findings transitory shocks are more important than permanent shocks for three of the four countries

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

commodity futures and market efficiency we propose a comprehensive treatment of the leverage effect i e the relationship between returns and volatility of a specific asset focusing on energy commodities futures namely brent and wti crude oils natural gas and heating oil after estimating the volatility process without assuming any specific form of its behavior we find the volatility to be long term dependent with the hurst exponent on a verge of stationarity and non stationarity to overcome such complication we utilize the detrended cross correlation and the detrending moving average cross correlation coefficients and we find the standard leverage effect for both crude oils and heating oil for natural gas we find the inverse leverage effect additionally we report that the strength of the leverage effects is scale dependent finally we also show that none of the effects between returns and volatility is detected as the long term cross correlated one these findings can be further utilized to enhance forecasting models and mainly in the risk management and portfolio diversification

a long run structural macroeconometric model of the uk a new modelling strategy that provides a practical approach to incorporating long run structural relationships suggested by economic theory in an otherwise unrestricted var model is applied to construct a small quarterly macroeconometric model of the uk estimated over 1965q1 1999q4 in nine variables domestic and foreign outputs prices and interest rates oil prices the nominal effective exchange rate and real money balances the aim is to develop a model with a transparent and theoretically coherent foundation tests of restrictions on the long run relations of the model are presented the dynamic properties of the model are discussed and monetary policy shocks identified

the relationship between crude oil spot and futures prices cointegration linear and nonlinear causality the present study investigates the linear and nonlinear causal linkages between daily spot and futures prices for maturities of one two three and four months of west texas intermediate wti crude oil the data cover two periods october 1991 october 1999 and november 1999 october 2007 with the latter being significantly more turbulent apart from the conventional linear granger test we apply a new nonparametric test for nonlinear causality by diks and panchenko after controlling for cointegration in addition to the traditional pairwise analysis we test for causality while correcting for the effects of the other variables to check if any of the observed causality is strictly nonlinear in nature we also examine the nonlinear causal relationships of vecm filtered residuals finally we investigate the hypothesis of nonlinear non causality after controlling for conditional heteroskedasticity in the data using a garch bekk model whilst the linear causal relationships disappear after vecm cointegration filtering nonlinear causal linkages in some cases persist even after garch filtering in both periods this indicates that spot and futures returns may exhibit asymmetric garch effects and or statistically significant higher order conditional moments moreover the results imply that if nonlinear effects are accounted for neither market leads or lags the other consistently videlicet the pattern of leads and lags changes over time

market efficiency of oil spot and futures a mean variance and stochastic dominance approach this paper examines the market efficiency of oil spot and futures prices by using both mean variance mv and stochastic dominance sd approaches based on the west texas intermediate crude oil data for the sample period 1989 2008 we find no evidence of any mv and sd relationships between oil spot and futures indices this infers that there is no arbitrage opportunity between these two markets spot and futures do not dominate one another investors are indifferent to investing spot or futures and the spot and futures oil markets are efficient and rational the empirical findings are robust to each sub period before and after the crises for different crises and also to portfolio diversification

applied cointegration analysis in the mirror of macroeconomic theory summary cointegration analyses of macroeconomic time series are often not based on fully specified theoretical models we use a theoretical model to scrutinize common procedures in applied cointegration analysis monte carlo experiments show that 1 some tests of the cointegration vectors do not work well on series generated by an equilibrium business cycle model 2 cointegration restrictions add little to forecasting 3 structural var models based on weak long run restrictions seem to work well the main disadvantages of cointegration analysis without strong links to economic theory are that it makes it hard to estimate and interpret the cointegration vectors

decomposition of us manufacturing energy intensity and elasticities of components with respect to energy prices this paper proposes an analysis of changes in the us manufacturing energy intensity between 1974 and 1998 the starting point is a three term decomposition of an intensity index which evaluates annually the respective contributions of changes in industrial structure efficiency gains at the sectoral level and substitution between energy resources to aggregate productivity improvements then we study the time paths followed by each of these three components using spectral analysis techniques we show that they behave very differently as the structural influence plays a part mainly in the short run substitution between energy resources acts principally in the long run and the changes in sectoral intensity cause both trend variations and cyclical ones finally we focus on the effect of energy price evolution on each of the three components allowing energy price rises and decreases to have asymmetric effects we estimate both the long run impacts and the short run adjustments

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations in a small open economy in this paper we describe how restricted vector autoregressions can be employed to examine the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations we show how cointegration restrictions can be used to identify a var system with common stochastic trends subject to transitory and permanent changes in average growth and how we may investigate the system s responses to permanent shocks i e to innovations to the trends theoretical cointegration vectors are derived from a small open economy growth model for terms of trade real gdp real consumption and real investments applying these methods to swedish annual data 1875 1986 we find that permanent real supply shocks account for most of the fluctuations in gdp even in the short run

the impacts of energy prices on energy intensity evidence from china in this paper we present a review of the deregulation of energy prices in china between 1985 and 2004 and assess the impacts of changes in energy prices on aggregate energy intensity and coal oil electricity intensity we used time series data to provide estimates of energy price elasticities empirical results showed that 1 the own price elasticities of coal oil and aggregate energy were negative in periods both before and after 1995 implying that higher relative prices of different energy types lead to the decrease in coal oil and aggregate energy intensities however the positive own price elasticity of electricity after 1995 probably indicates that the price effect was weaker than other factors such as income effect and population effect 2 the impacts of energy prices were asymmetric over time 3 sectoral adjustment also drove the decrease in aggregate energy intensity although raising energy prices to boost efficiency of energy use seems to be an effective policy tool other policy implications concerned with energy prices such as energy supply security and fuel poverty must also be considered

efficiency of crude oil markets evidences from informational entropy analysis abstract the role of crude oil as the main energy source for the global economic activity has motivated the discussion about the dynamics and causes of crude oil price changes an accurate understanding of the issue should provide important guidelines for the design of optimal policies and government budget planning using daily data for wti over the period january 1986 march 2011 we analyze the evolution of the informational complexity and efficiency for the crude oil market through multiscale entropy analysis the results indicated that the crude oil market is informationally efficient over the scrutinized period except for two periods that correspond to the early 1990s and late 2000s us recessions overall the results showed that deregulation has improved the operation of the market in the sense of making returns less predictable on the other hand there is some evidence that the probability of having a severe us economic recession increases as the informational efficiency decreases which indicates that returns from crude oil markets are less uncertain during economic downturns