gold and crude oil prices after the great moderation abstract previous studies have reported that gold prices and crude oil prices seem to be related with causality generally running from oil prices to gold prices this paper revisits the question using non linear threshold cointegration methods it examines how a shock to oil prices affects gold prices with the impacts shown to depend on both the size of the shock and the region within which the system lies when the shock occurs this simple yet novel result helps to explain why earlier studies found conflicting evidence on whether gold and crude prices share a long run relationship the empirical findings also suggest that energy policies should not be designed without consideration for their interaction with financial policies

supply and demand driven oil price changes and their non linear impact on precious metal returns a markov regime switching approach abstract this paper examines the nonlinear effect of oil price shocks on precious metal returns using markov regime switching regression we use ready s 2018 approach to decompose oil price changes into supply demand and risk driven shocks results indicate a significant positive impact of demand and supply shocks and a negative impact of risk shocks on precious metal returns although we find evidence of switching between low and high volatility regimes we do not find strong regime effect on supply or demand shocks contemporaneous relationship with precious metal returns however risk shocks influence on precious metal returns is strongly regime dependent these results generally hold for different distributional specification of error terms

multi scale dependence structure and risk contagion between oil gold and us exchange rate a wavelet based vine copula approach abstract this study makes a systemic analysis of dependence and risk contagion among oil gold and the us dollar foreign exchange us fx markets employing the wavelet method and a time varying tri variate vine copula model compared to previous research our empirical findings not only reveal the impact of co variate instead of pairwise analysis but also reveal the patterns of heterogeneity influence in different time horizons both dynamic average dependence and tail dependence show that the three assets are better integrated in the medium run time scales than the short run time scales whereby us fx connects the three assets in the short term while gold does so in the medium term all three multi variate scenarios show that risk contagion is temporal at different time scales the oil market was found to be more sensitive to the upside and downside risk contagion of the gold market in the short run time scales and vice versa asymmetry also shows that both the us fx and gold market are more sensitive to upside and downside risk contagion in the medium run time scales

bicameralism and its consequences for the internal organization of legislatures theories of organization of legislatures have mainly focused on the u s congress explaining why committee systems emerge there but not explaining variance in organization across legislatures of different countries to analyze the effects of different constitutional features on the internal organization of legislatures we adopt a vote buying model and consider the incentives to delegate decision rights in a game among legislative chambers we show how presidential veto power and bicameral separation can encourage a legislative chamber to create internal veto players or supermajority rules while a unicameral structure can encourage legislators to delegate power to a leader

coalition and party formation in a legislative voting game we examine a legislative voting game where decisions are being made over both ideological and distributive dimensions and legislators preferences are separable over the two dimensions in equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together rather than offering sequential proposals on the two dimensions separately the equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions and in any equilibrium there is a positive probability that a proposal is made and approved which excludes the median legislator as defined over the ideological dimension in contrast with a game where no distributive decision is being made moreover in any stationary equilibrium there is more than one ideological decision that has a positive probability of being proposed and approved we show that legislators can gain from forming political parties and consider examples where predictions can be made about the composition of parties we discuss the impact of political parties on the outcome

bargaining foundations of shapley value1 a transferable utility economy in which each agent holds a resource which can be used in combination with the resources of other agents to generate value according to the characteristic function v is studied using a dynamic model of bargaining the main theorem establishes that the payoffs associated with efficient equilibria converge to the agents shapley values as the time between periods of the dynamic game goes to zero in addition it is demonstrated that an efficient equilibrium exists and is unique when an additivity condition is satisfied to demonstrate the sensitivity of the solution to the institutional detail we modify the model to allow for partnerships and show that the shapley value is no longer achieved

voting power in the ec decision making and the consequences of two different enlargements abstract in this paper we study the voting power in the council of ministers of the ec the purpose of this paper is twofold first to evaluate the voting power for the member states of today s community and second to analyse the balance of power after two different enlargements of the community the analysis is based on the shapley shubik and the banzhaf power indices of simple cooperative games the modified version of the shapley shubik index is used to analyse how the sub systems of the ec can change the distribution of power in the decision making process

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

oil prices and the rise and fall of the us real exchange rate abstract questions of the relative importance of real vs monetary shocks in explaining exchange rate movements still have no widely accepted answer despite their importance both for the research agenda and for policy questions we examine this issue using a variety of empirical techniques for the us effective exchange rate we find that a stable link exists between oil price shocks and the us real effective exchange rate over the post bretton woods period the results suggest that oil prices may have been the dominant source of persistent real exchange rate shocks and that energy prices may have important implications for future work on exchange rate behavior

government turnover in parliamentary democracies in this paper we consider a dynamic model of government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies that accounts for the following phenomena 1 cabinet terminations due to replacement or early election 2 cabinet reshuf es 3 minority and surplus governments 4 the relative instability of minority governments

correlations in price changes and volatility across international stock markets the short run interdependence of prices and price volatility across three major international stock markets is studied daily opening and closing prices of major stock indexes for the tokyo london and new york stock markets are examined the analysis utilizes the autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic arch family of statistical models to explore these pricing relationships evidence of price volatility spillovers from new york to tokyo london to tokyo and new york to london is observed but no price volatility spillover effects in other directions are found for the pre october 1987 period article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

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

uniqueness of stationary equilibrium payoffs in coalitional bargaining we study a model of sequential bargaining in which in each period before an agreement is reached the proposer s identity is randomly determined the proposer suggests a division of a pie of size one each other agent either approves or rejects the proposal and the proposal is implemented if the set of approving agents is a winning coalition for the proposer the theory of the fixed point index is used to show that stationary equilibrium expected payoffs of this coalitional bargaining game are unique this generalizes eraslan 34 insofar as a there are no restrictions on the structure of sets of winning coalitions b different proposers may have different sets of winning coalitions c there may be a positive probability that no proposer is selected

presidential pork executive veto power and distributive politics mitigated to the extent that the president prefers spending in some districts over others the model also generates new insights and predictions about fiscal policy under the separation of powers including the effects of divided government electoral rules and term limitations for the executive

the economics of split ticket voting in representative democracies in u s elections voters often vote for candidates from different parties for president and congress voters also express dissatisfaction with the performance of congress as a whole and satisfaction with their own representative the authors develop a model of split ticket voting in which government spending is financed by uniform taxes the benefits from this spending are concentrated while the model generates split ticket voting overall spending is too high only if the president s powers are limited overall spending is too high in a parliamentary system the authors model can be used as the basis of an argument for term limits copyright 1997 by american economic association

the power of the states in u s presidential elections the electoral college is a uniquely american political institution yet its impact on both the power of the american states and the relative power of citizens living in different states is not well understood game theorists have broached the state power problem exclusively in terms of the size of each of the states empirical investigators have been less systematic basing their analyses solely on which states have been close in a single election in this paper we present a model of state power which combines the idea of the pivotal player from game theory with an empirical model of state voting in doing so we provide a theoretically derived and empirically meaningful assessment of state power in presidential elections we then trace the implications of the power of the states for the relative power of individual voters finding large disparities between voters from different states

legislative bargaining under weighted voting organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting we analyze this setting using a non cooperative bargaining game based on the baron ferejohn 1989 model unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory we find that each voter s expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight an exception occurs when many high weight voters exist as low weight voters may expect disproportionately high payoffs due to proposal power the model also predicts that ex post the coalition formateur the party chosen to form a coalition will receive a disproportionately high payoff using data from coalition governments from 1946 to 2001 we find strong evidence ofsuch formateur effects

an interregional analysis of price discrimination and domestic policy reform in the u s dairy sector the u s dairy sector has experienced several reforms in both government price support and classified pricing under state and federal milk marketing orders an interregional spatial market equilibrium model of the u s dairy sector is used to provide quantitative measures of the aggregate and regional impacts of alternative domestic deregulation scenarios the model simulates the allocation of farm milk used in the production of nine dairy products in a way consistent with milk component balances for milk fat protein and carbohydrate both within and across regions results suggest current policies induce substantive aggregate and regional distortions relative to an unregulated policy

noncooperative foundations of the nucleolus in majority games abstract this paper studies coalition formation payoff division and expected payoffs in a divide the dollar by majority rule game with random proposers a power index is called self confirming if it can be obtained as an equilibrium of the game using the index itself as probability vector unlike the shapley value and other commonly used power indices the nucleolus has this property the proof uses a weak version of kohlberg s siam j appl math 20 1971 62 balancedness result reinterpreting the balancing weights as probabilities in a mixed strategy equilibrium

flexible integration emu and relative voting power in the eu this paper studies the implications offlexible integration in the european union itanalyses the voting power of member states in thecouncil of ministers when differently sized subgroupsof the eu are set up european monetary union isreferred to as the most important example of flexibleintegration the banzhaf index is calculated to studythe distribution of voting power in the decisionmaking process according to the stability and growthpact the results show considerable fluctuations especially for smaller countries in relative votingpower the latter being defined as the relationbetween voting power and relative voting weight

majority rule bargaining and the under provision of public investment goods abstract despite evidence that modern democracies systematically shortchange public investment goods relatively little theoretical work exists to explain this phenomenon we build on baron and ferejohn s american political science review 83 4 1989 1181 1206 bargaining model to describe public investments in a setting of budgetary politics specifically we show that underinvestment inherently arises from distributive politics within a majoritarian institution the inability of current majorities to contract with future ones drives a wedge between spending on consumption today and investing for future consumption extensions to the model demonstrate that earmarking future returns to specific players and or detaching consumption from investment decisions yields more efficient levels of public investment

the nucleolus of large majority games members of a shareholder meeting or legislative committee have greater or smaller voting power than meets the eye if the nucleolus of the induced majority game differs from the voting weight distribution we establish a new sufficient condition for the weight and power distributions to be equal and we characterize the limit behavior of the nucleolus in case all relative weights become small

does inflation cause gold market price changes evidence on the g7 countries from the tests of nonparametric quantile causality in mean and variance this paper utilises the newly proposed nonparametric causality in quantiles test to examine the predictability of mean and variance of changes in gold prices based on inflation for g7 countries the causality in quantiles approach permits us to test for not only causality in mean but also causality in variance we start our investigation by utilising tests for nonlinearity these tests identify nonlinearity showing that the linear granger causality tests are subject to misspecification error unlike tests of misspecified linear models our nonparametric causality in quantiles tests find causality in mean and variance from inflation to gold market price changes between the 0 20 quantile and the 0 70 quantile implying that very low and high price changes in gold markets are not related to inflation these changes should be related to other sources such as financial shocks and exchange market shocks we find support that gold serves as a hedge against inflation but only in the mid quantile ranges i e quantiles from 0 20 to 0 70 our results show that gold does not serve as a hedge against inflation during periods when gold market price changes are very low or very high which are respectively quiet and highly volatile periods

toward an optimal u s ethanol fuel subsidy abstract enhanced environmental quality fuel security and economic development along with reduced prices of ethanol gasoline blends are often used as justifications for the u s federal excise tax exemption on ethanol fuels however the possible effect of increased overall consumption of fuel in response to lower total price mitigating the environmental and fuel security benefits are generally not considered taking this price response into account the optimal u s ethanol subsidy is derived estimated values of the optimal subsidy reveal that the subsidy s environmental and security benefits are questionable however positive environmental and security benefits from the ethanol tax exemption subsidy may be obtained if the subsidy is combined with an increase in the excise tax on gasoline

interactive relationships between crude oil prices gold prices and the nt us dollar exchange rate a taiwan study this investigation examines the correlations of oil prices gold prices and the nt dollar versus u s dollar exchange rate during 2007 09 03 2011 12 28 johansen co integration test var model granger causality test impulse response analysis and variance decomposition method were used to clarify the interactive relationships among the three variables these tests and models show that the oil price gold price and exchange rate remain considerably independent from one another which implies policymakers should consider the separation of energy and financial policies

the effect of global oil price shocks on china s metal markets this paper investigated the impacts of global oil price shocks on the whole metal market and two typical metal markets copper and aluminum we applied the autoregressive conditional jump intensity arji model combining with the generalized conditional heteroscedasticity grach method to describe the volatility process and jump behavior in the global oil market we separated the oil price shocks into positive and negative parts to analyze whether oil price volatility had symmetric impacts on china s metal markets we further used the likelihood ratio test to examine the symmetric effect of oil price shocks in addition we considered the jump behavior in oil prices as an input factor to investigate how china s metal markets are affected when jumps occur in the global oil market in contrast to the existing research paying little attention to this issue our results indicate that crude oil price shocks have significant impacts on china s metal markets and the impacts are symmetric when compared with aluminum copper is more easily affected by oil price shocks

a noncooperative coalitional bargaining game with random proposers abstract we extend the stahl rubinstein s alternating offer model ton person coalitional bargaining the key feature of the model is the random selection of proposers at every round no delay of agreement occurs in equilibrium for a super additive game in contrast to the fixed order model of chatterjeeet al rev econ stud 60 1993 463 477 when the discount factor of future payoffs is sufficiently high the agreement on the grand coalition is reached if and only if it has the largest value per capita among all coalitions moreover in the limit as the discount factor goes to one all players divide equally the value of the grand coalition regardless of who makes a proposal journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 c73 c78

welfare maximization pricing and allocation with a product performance or environmental quality standard illustration for the gasoline and additives market programming models approximate market prices and quantities when regulations constrain firm choices because market outcomes result when welfare is appropriately defined and includes performance and environmental constraints this study discusses market operation in quality constrained sectors like gasoline and additives processors expand output until marginal processing cost equals the processing margin between product revenues and raw material costs retailers who buy gasoline and additives from processors and sell blended retail gasoline price sales at a marginal cost that includes the blended input value plus adjustments for values of constrained attributes and market supplies and demands of measurable attributes like octane are balanced this method can enhance predictions about the effects of new policies that regulate product quality analysis can now include price and output adjustment in factor and product markets and the competitiveness of new processes and products

seniority in legislatures we construct a stochastic game model of a legislature with an endogenously determined seniority system we model the behavior of the legislators as well as their constituents in an infinitely repeated divide the dollar game each legislative session must make a decision on redistributional issues modeled as a divide the dollar game however each session begins with a vote in which the legislators decide by majority rule whether or not to impose on themselves a seniority system legislative decisions on the redistributional issues are made by the baron ferejohn rule an agenda setter is selected by a random recognition rule which in our model is a function of the seniority system selected the agenda setter makes a proposal on redistributional issues and the legislature then votes whether to accept or reject the agenda setters proposal if the legislature rejects the proposal another agenda setter is randomly selected and the process is repeated if the legislature accepts the proposal the legislative session ends and the voters in each legislative district vote whether to retain their legislator or throw it out of office the voters verdict determines the seniority structure of the next period legislature we find a stationary equilibrium to the game having the property that the legislature imposes on itself a non trivial seniority system and that legislators are always reelected