wheat from chaff meta analysis as quantitative literature review abstract this paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research meta regression analysis or mra economics is theory driven yet we must learn empirically if economics is to advance mra offers a more objective statistical method to summarize our empirical knowledge and to explain the wide study to study variation in economic research mra is used to assess the evidence for ricardian equivalence and its findings are contrasted to those of conventional narrative review furthermore mra establishes a platform from which to distinguish genuine empirical effect from the exploitable specification error that infests applied econometrics

the role of collateral in credit markets with imperfect information abstract the paper analyzes the structure of credit market equilibrium under imperfect information collateralization and credit rationing are compared as alternative means to cope with problems of adverse selection and moral hazard it is shown that lenders may use collateral as a self selection and incentive mechanism rationing occurs only if the borrowers collaterizable wealth is too small to allow perfect sorting or to create sufficiently strong incentives whenever there is rationing in an equilibrium some borrowers are charged the maximum amount of collateral

oil market conditions and sovereign risk in mena oil exporters and importers abstract we analyze for the first time how various levels of oil returns and oil volatility changes affect sovereign risk in static and time varying settings empirical analyses involve daily data from february 14 2011 to november 23 2018 covering a sample of mena oil exporters and importers the results from a quantile based approach show that the sovereign risk of mena oil exporters and importers is directionally predicted by shocks in oil prices and oil volatility especially during the oil crash of 2014 2016 overall the impact of oil returns and volatility changes occur in a very short time span that is within one day lag and the quantile specific reactions of sovereign risk spreads are time varying the impact of oil returns is asymmetric across quantiles the results hold when we control for stock market returns the findings have implications for investors in terms of portfolio and risk management importantly the findings are useful to policymakers for sovereign risk management decisions the cost of sovereign borrowing and the market timing of debt issuance finally the findings matter to bankers given that central and domestic banks hold large amounts of sovereign debt which makes banking systems particularly exposed to their own sovereign stress

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 price shocks and real gdp growth empirical evidence for some oecd countries this study assesses empirically the effects of oil price shocks on the real economic activity of the main industrialized countries multivariate var analysis is carried out using both linear and non linear models the latter category includes three approaches employed in the literature namely the asymmetric scaled and net specifications evidence of a non linear impact of oil prices on real gdp is found in particular oil price increases are found to have an impact on gdp growth of a larger magnitude than that of oil price declines with the latter being statistically insignificant in most cases among oil importing countries oil price increases are found to have a negative impact on economic activity in all cases but japan moreover the effect of oil shocks on gdp growth differs between the two oil exporting countries in the sample with the uk being negatively affected by an oil price increase and norway benefiting from it

financing high technology startups in belgium an explorative study the results of an explorative study on the financing of 18 high technology belgian startups are reported on a counts basis the most important sources of financing at the startup are the entrepreneurs and the banks but the sources that provide the largest amounts of funds are the venture capital companies and private investors private investors and venture capitalists have a complementary role with the former investing mostly at the startup and the latter financing the early growth the role of the government universities and other companies is limited

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

impacts of oil price shocks on the united states economy a meta analysis of the oil price elasticity of gdp for net oil importing economies policy makers are interested in estimates of the potential economic impacts of oil price shocks particularly during periods of rapid and large increases that accompany severe supply shocks literature estimates of the economic impacts of oil price shocks summarized by the oil price elasticity of gdp span a very wide range due to both fundamental economic and methodological factors this paper presents a quantitative meta analysis of the oil price elasticity of gdp for net oil importing countries with a focus on the united states us the full range of estimates of the oil price elasticity of gdp for the us in the data is 0 124 to 0 017 accounting for different methodologies data and other factors we employ a meta regression model that controls for key determinant factors to estimate the mean and variance of the gdp elasticity across studies we use a robust estimation technique to deal with heterogeneity of the data and well known econometric issues that confront meta analysis the resulting regression model is used to simulate the oil price elasticity of gdp for the us with a mean of 0 020 and 68 confidence interval of 0 035 to 0 006 four quarters after a shock

macroeconomic impacts of fdi in transition economies a meta analysis summary in this paper we conduct a meta analysis of the literature that empirically examines the impact of foreign direct investment fdi on economic growth in central and eastern europe and the former soviet union we found that existing studies indicate a growth enhancing effect of fdi in the region as a whole the results of our meta regression analysis suggest that the effect size and statistical significance of the reported estimates strongly depend on study conditions we also found that the relevant studies fail to present genuine evidence of a non zero fdi effect more research is necessary to identify the true effect

a comparison of the effects of exogenous oil supply shocks on output and inflation in the g7 countries a comparison of the effects of exogenous shocks to global crude oil production on seven major industrialized economies suggests a fair degree of similarity in the real growth responses an exogenous oil supply disruption typically causes a temporary reduction in real gdp growth that is concentrated in the second year after the shock inflation responses are more varied the median cpi inflation response peaks after three to four quarters exogenous oil supply disruptions need not generate sustained inflation or stagflation typical responses include a fall in the real wage higher short term interest rates and a depreciating currency with respect to the dollar despite many qualitative similarities there is strong statistical evidence that the responses to exogenous oil supply disruptions differ across g7 countries for suitable subsets of countries homogeneity cannot be ruled out a counterfactual historical exercise suggests that the evolution of cpi inflation in the g7 countries would have been similar overall to the actual path even in the absence of exogenous shocks to oil production consistent with a monetary explanation of the inflation of the 1970s there is no evidence that the 1973 1974 and 2002 2003 oil supply shocks had a substantial impact on real growth in any g7 country whereas the 1978 1979 1980 and 1990 1991 shocks contributed to lower growth in at least some g7 countries jel e31 e32 q43

interfuel substitution a meta analysis interfuel substitutability has been of longstanding interest to the energy economics and policy community however no quantitative meta analysis has yet been carried out of this literature this paper fills this gap by analyzing a broad sample of studies of interfuel substitution in the industrial sector manufacturing industry or subindustries or macro economy of a variety of developed and developing economies publication bias is controlled for by including the primary study sample size in the meta regression results for the shadow elasticities of substitution between coal oil gas and electricity for forty six primary studies show that at the level of the industrial sector there are easy substitution possibilities between all the fuel pairs with the exception of gas electricity and coal electricity substitution possibilities seem more constrained at the macro level and less constrained in sub industries estimates also vary across countries publication bias does not seem to be present but model and data specification issues very significantly affect the estimates derived by each individual study estimates from cross section regressions are generally largest fixed effects panel estimates intermediate in magnitude and time series estimates are mostly much smaller econometric research suggests that the fixed effects estimates are likely the best among the existing studies though biased downwards

a meta analysis on the price elasticity of energy demand abstract price elasticities of energy demand have become increasingly relevant in estimating the socio economic and environmental effects of energy policies or other events that influence the price of energy goods since the 1970s a large number of academic papers have provided both short and long term price elasticity estimates for different countries using several models data and estimation techniques yet the literature offers a rather wide range of estimates for the price elasticities of demand for energy this paper quantitatively summarizes the recent but sizeable empirical evidence to facilitate a sounder economic assessment of in some cases policy related energy price changes it uses meta analysis to identify the main factors affecting short and long term elasticity results for energy in general as well as for specific products i e electricity natural gas gasoline diesel and heating oil

meta regression analysis a quantitative method of literature surveys abstract pedagogically literature reviews are instrumental they summarize the large literature written on a particular topic give coherence to the complex often disparate views expressed about an issue and serve as a springboard for new ideas however literature surveys rarely establish anything approximating unanimous consensus ironically this is just as true for the empirical economic literature to harmonize this dissonance we offer a quantitative methodology for reviewing the empirical economic literature meta regression analysis mra is the regression analysis of regression analyses mra tends to objectify the review process it studies the processes that produce empirical economic results as though they were any other social scientific phenomenon mra provides a framework for replication and offers a sensitivity analysis for model specification in this brief essay we propose a new method of reviewing economic literature mra and discuss its potential

public goods tax policies and unemployment in ldcs 1 introduction traditionally an analytically convenient and widely used assumption in the international trade and development economics literature has been that of lump sum distribution of direct e g income or indirect e g consumption tariff tax revenue when various policy implications of such instruments e g terms of trade or welfare effects were to be examined this analytical shortcut however hardly ever constitutes a real world practice either in rich developed or in poorer developing economies on the other hand another extensive branch of economics the public finance literature has adopted a more realistic approach regarding the economic activity of a government a government is viewed among other things as a provider of public collective consumption goods and or of public inputs that enhance the productive capacity of the private sector being so it can use revenues from nondistortionary e g lump sum taxes or distortionary e g consumption taxes to finance the provision of such goods and services within this public finance context a long standing proposition states that when nondistortionary taxes are used to finance the provision of a public good the first best efficiency rule requires that the sum of the marginal rates of substitution i e the social marginal benefit equal the marginal rate of transformation i e the social marginal cost e g see samuelson 1954 when distortionary taxes are used to finance the provision of the public good pigou 1947 argued that the social marginal cost exceeds the private marginal cost because of the induced indirect cost from raising tax revenue through distortionary taxation stiglitz and dasgupta 1971 atkinson and stem 1974 and wildasin 1984 among others demonstrate that in certain cases e g when the taxed and the public goods are complements in consumption pigou s argument fails to hold and the social cost may fall short of the private marginal cost because of its more realistic appeal this public finance approach to the use of tax revenue has been subsequently adopted by the relevant international trade and development economics literature recently the efficiency rule for public good provision has been examined in the context of a small open economy by among others feehan 1988 when tariff revenue finances the provision of the public good in an economy producing two traded goods and a nontraded public consumption good michael and hatzipanayotou 1995 examine the same issue and derive the formulae for the optimal tax rates on traded or nontraded goods in an economy producing many traded and nontraded goods and where consumption tax revenue finances the provision of the public good michael and hatzipanayotou 1997 demonstrate the failure of the first best efficiency rule when lump sum taxes are used to finance the provision of a public good in a small open economy in the presence of trade restrictions i e a tariff or a ver two features in the above reviewed studies of the international trade development economics and public finance literature motivate the present paper first all these studies derive the efficiency rule for public good provision in the context of a small open or closed economy with full employment unemployment however to a lesser or to a larger extent remains a structural feature of many developed or developing economies from an analytical standpoint the existence of such a distortion may alter both the optimal tax formulae and the efficiency rule for public good provision second the above reviewed literature considers the case where a government uses a single policy instrument e g lump sum taxes income taxes tariffs to finance the provision of the public good more than often however governments may have at their disposal several tax instruments that they can simultaneously use in order to raise revenue for financing the provision of public consumption goods

fast growing small entrepreneurial firms and their venture capital backers an applied principal agent analysis first the empirical background of the u k venture capital industry is developed using a panel of major u k venture capital funds over the period 1988 92 then a framework for applied principal agent analysis is developed focusing on risk management and information under risk management it explores attitude to risk risk sharing and bearing and the effects of risk bearing on effort under information handling it explores information systems information asymmetries between investor venture capitalist and investee entrepreneur and ways of attenuating them and information variance and costs finally the contract between investor and investee is seen as a device for trading risk and information the implications of this trading for risk bearing effort and efficiency are explored the whole analysis is supported by a detailed case study which reflects current practice in the u k venture capital industry the evidence provides striking confirmation of the applicability of the principal agent model to the venture capital financing of hightech ventures

why are the 2000s so different from the 1970s a structural interpretation of changes in the macroeconomic effects of oil prices in the 1970s large increases in the price of oil were associated with sharp decreases in output and large increases in inflation in the 2000s even larger increases in the price of oil were associated with much milder movements in output and inflation using a structural var approach blanchard and gali in j gali and m gertler eds 2009 international dimensions of monetary policy university of chicago press pp 373 428 argued that this reflected a change in the causal relation from the price of oil to output and inflation they then argued that this change could be due to a combination of three factors a smaller share of oil in production and consumption lower real wage rigidity and better monetary policy their argument based on simulations of a simple new keynesian model was informal our purpose in this paper is to take the next step and to estimate the explanatory power and contribution of each of these factors to do so we use a minimum distance estimator that minimizes over the set of structural parameters and for each of two samples pre and post 1984 the distance between the empirical svar based impulse response functions and those implied by a new keynesian model our empirical results point to an important role for all three factors

oil and the macroeconomy since the 1970s economists have long been intrigued by empirical evidence that suggests that oil price shocks may be closely related to macroeconomic performance this interest dates back to the 1970s the 1970s were a period of growing dependence on imported oil unprecedented disruptions in the global oil market and poor macroeconomic performance in the united states thus it was natural to suspect a causal relationship from oil prices to u s macroeconomic aggregates since then a large body of work has accumulated that purports to establish this link on theoretical grounds and to provide empirical evidence in its support we do not attempt a comprehensive survey of this literature but rather provide an idiosyncratic synthesis of what we view as the key issues in this debate and the insights gained over the last 30 years the timing seems right for such an account although the experience of the 1970s continues to play an important role in discussions of the link between oil and the macroeconomy there have been a number of new oil price shocks since the 1970s notably the 1986 collapse of oil prices and the 2000 boom in oil prices as well as the oil price increases associated with the 1990 1991 gulf war and the 2003 iraq war given this richer case history we are arguably in a better position than two decades ago to distinguish the idiosyncratic features of each oil crisis from the systematic effects increases in oil prices have been held responsible for recessions periods of excessive inflation reduced productivity and lower economic growth in this paper we review the arguments supporting such views first we highlight some of the conceptual difficulties in assigning a central role to oil price shocks in explaining

what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract strong evidence is found that oil prices no longer granger cause many u s macroeconomic indicator variables in data after 1973 a number of potential explanations are explored that sample stability issues are responsible that oil prices are now endogenous and that linear and symmetric specifications misrepresent the form of the oil price interaction none of these hypotheses are supported by the data the opec price increases do appear to have had significant impacts while the effects of the price declines of the 1980s are smaller and harder to characterize these results have potentially important implications for the large body of research which utilizes oil prices as an instrumental or explanatory variable

this is what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract many of the quarterly oil price increases observed since 1985 are corrections to even bigger oil price decreases the previous quarter when one looks at the net increase in oil prices over the year recent data are consistent with the historical correlation between oil shocks and recessions

exogenous oil supply shocks how big are they and how much do they matter for the u s economy abstract the paper proposes a new measure of exogenous oil supply shocks the timing the magnitude and the sign of this measure may differ greatly from current state of the art estimates it is shown that only a small fraction of the observed oil price increases during oil crisis periods can be attributed to exogenous oil production disruptions exogenous oil supply shocks cause a sharp drop of u s real gdp growth after five quarters rather than an immediate and sustained reduction in economic growth and a spike in cpi inflation after three quarters overall exogenous oil supply shocks made remarkably little difference for the evolution of the u s economy since the 1970s although they did matter for some historical episodes

a meta analysis of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a sur approach abstract automobile gasoline demand can be expressed as a multiplicative function of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership this implies a linear relationship between the price elasticity of total fuel demand and the price elasticities of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership in this meta analytical study we aim to investigate and explain the variation in empirical estimates of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a methodological novelty is that we use the linear relationship between the elasticities to develop a meta analytical estimation approach based on a seemingly unrelated regression sur model with cross equation restrictions this approach enables us to combine observations of different elasticities and thus increase our sample size furthermore it allows for a more detailed interpretation of our meta regression results the empirical results of the study demonstrate that the sur approach leads to more precise results i e lower standard errors than a standard meta analytical approach we find that with mean short run and long run price elasticities of 0 34 and 0 84 respectively the demand for gasoline is not very price sensitive both in the short and the long run the impact of a change in the gasoline price on demand is mainly driven by responses in fuel efficiency and mileage per car and to a slightly lesser degree by changes in car ownership furthermore we find that study characteristics relating to the geographic area studied the year of the study the type of data used the time horizon and the functional specification of the demand equation have a significant impact on the estimated value of the price elasticity of gasoline demand

the provision of finance to innovation a survey conducted among italian technology based small firms financial constraints to the development of innovation are often considered one of the main impediments to high technology firms seeking to expand and grow in particular this is the case of small and medium size high tech firms in the u s and the u k a variety of sources of finance are available to the start ups of innovative firms in the other european countries and particularly in italy these means are still uncommon so that the development of technology is often prevented this paper based on an empirical analysis on a survey of 46 small high tech italian firms aims at exploring the problems experienced by small businesses in gaining access to debt and equity finance the results highlight that traditional financial sources are inadequate to finance innovative projects the questioned firms rely mainly on personal finance and secondly on short term bank debt they are truly involved in maintaining control over the firm activities and are willing to issue outside equity only if the new investors also provide non financial competencies among the 46 interviewed firms only 10 are willing to be listed in the future on small firms stock markets

the differential effects of oil demand and supply shocks on the global economy abstract we employ a set of sign restrictions on the impulse responses of a global var model estimated for 38 countries regions over the period 1979q2 2011q2 as well as bounds on impact price elasticities of oil supply and oil demand to discriminate between supply driven and demand driven oil price shocks and to study the time profile of their macroeconomic effects across a wide range of countries and real financial variables we show that the above identification scheme can greatly benefit from the cross sectional dimension of the gvar by providing a large number of additional cross country sign restrictions and hence reducing the set of admissible models the results indicate that the economic consequences of a supply driven oil price shock are very different from those of an oil demand shock driven by global economic activity and vary for oil importing countries compared to energy exporters while oil importers typically face a long lived fall in economic activity in response to a supply driven surge in oil prices the impact is positive for energy exporting countries that possess large proven oil gas reserves however in response to an oil demand disturbance almost all countries in our sample experience long run inflationary pressures an increase in real output a rise in interest rates and a fall in equity prices

income elasticity of gasoline demand a meta analysis abstract in this paper we quantitatively synthesize empirical estimates of the income elasticity of gasoline demand reported in previous studies the studies cover many countries and report a mean elasticity of 0 28 for the short run and 0 66 for the long run we show however that these mean estimates are biased upwards because of publication bias the tendency to suppress negative and insignificant estimates of the elasticity we employ mixed effects multilevel meta regression to filter out publication bias from the literature our results suggest that the income elasticity of gasoline demand is on average much smaller than reported in previous surveys the mean corrected for publication bias is 0 1 for the short run and 0 23 for the long run

growing firms and the credit constraint restricted access to finance either debt or equity or both is potentially a significant constraint on the growth of small businesses financing problems arise primarily as a consequence of information asymmetries the adverse effects of these may in part be counteracted by the use of collateral as a signalling and bonding mechanism and or by the development of a good working relationship between lender and borrower if the form of information asymmetry differs for growth firms or if the effects of information asymmetries are less easily ameliorated then growing firms may be more adversely affected by credit constraints if growth is contingent upon access to credit then the generalised implications for the economy may be significant and detrimental using evidence from a survery of over 6 000 firms conducted in 1992 this paper addresses the extent to which growth firms are adversely affected by a credit constraint the results suggest that the credit constraint for growing firms per se is no greater but growth firms may still experience a credit constraint as a consequence of their relative youth however there is evidence to suggest that firms expecting to grow in the future do perceive a rather tighter credit constraint but this may be partly or wholly offset by a generally better relationship with their bank

oil and the macroeconomy when prices go up and down an extension of hamilton s results in an important paper hamilton 1983 demonstrated a strong correlation between oil price changes and gross national product growth in u s data however his study pertained to a period in which all the large oil price movements were upward and thus it left unanswered the question whether the correlation persists in periods of price decline moreover the price variable he used was somewhat distorted by price controls in the 1970s this note investigates whether hamilton s results continue to hold when the sample is extended to include the recent oil market collapse and the oil price variable is corrected for the effects of price controls particular attention is given to the possibility of asymmetric responses to oil price increases and decreases as suggested in the structural employment literature loungani 1986 davis 1987 hamilton 1988 like hamilton i based my investigation on the gnp equation in sims s 1 980b six variable quarterly vector autoregressive model

oil shocks and aggregate macroeconomic behavior the role of monetary policy a recent paper by bernanke gertler and watson 1997 suggests that monetary policy could be used to eliminate any recessionary consequences of an oil price shock this paper challenges this conclusion on two grounds first we question whether the federal reserve actually has the power to implement such a policy for example we consider it unlikely that additional money creation would have succeeded in reducing the fed funds rate by 900 basis points relative to the values seen in 1974 second we point out that the size of the effect that bernanke gertler and watson attribute to oil shocks is substantially smaller than that reported by other researchers primarily due to their choice of a shorter lag length than that used by other researchers we offer evidence in favor of the longer lag length employed by previous research and show that under this specification even the aggressive federal reserve policies proposed would not have succeeded in averting a downturn