does speculation impact what factors determine oil futures prices abstract recent studies provide contradictory evidence about the impact of speculation on commodity prices rather than directly evaluating this relationship we instead use a novel approach to assess if speculation can inform our choice of factor inclusion in modelling oil futures

the role of market expectations in commodity price dynamics evidence from oil data abstract this paper examines the contribution of market expectations to commodity price dynamics it proposes a dynamic competitive storage framework with an explicit expectations shock along with concurrent shocks to study the commodity price movements this allows for a refined analysis of the expectations effect on price and inventory and the estimation of the expectations applied to the world crude oil market it finds that the contribution of market expectations to the crude oil spot price movements is limited from 1987 to 2014

residential construction using the urban growth model to estimate housing supply abstract this article presents an empirical model of housing supply derived from urban growth theory this approach describes new housing construction as a function of changes in house prices and costs rather than as a function of the levels of those variables which previous studies have used empirical tests support this specification over the leading alternative models our estimates show that a 10 rise in real prices leads to an 0 8 increase in the housing stock which is accomplished by a temporary 60 increase in the annual number of starts spread over four quarters

commodity price risk management and fiscal policy in a sovereign default model abstract commodity prices are an important driver of fiscal policy and the business cycle in many developing and emerging market economies we analyze a dynamic stochastic small open economy model of sovereign default featuring endogenous fiscal policy and stochastic commodity revenues the model accounts for a positive correlation of commodity revenues with government expenditures and a negative correlation with tax rates we quantitatively document the extent to which the utilization of different financial hedging instruments by the government contributes to lowering the volatility of different macroeconomic variables and their correlation with commodity revenues an event analysis illustrates how financial hedging instruments moderate fiscal adjustment in response to significant falls in the price of commodities we evaluate the conditional and unconditional welfare gains for the representative household generated by financial derivatives and commodity indexed bonds

fertilizer subsidies and private market participation the case of kano state nigeria this article estimates the effect of a fertilizer voucher program on farmer participation in the private fertilizer market in nigeria using a double hurdle model to address corner solution challenges with estimating input demand and a control function approach to account for the endogeneity of subsidized fertilizer acquired the study finds evidence that receiving subsidized fertilizer in kano nigeria increased both the probability and extent of participation in the private fertilizer market findings demonstrate that under certain circumstances e g where input dealers links to farmer are weak there could be significant gains from the temporary use of voucher programs to strengthen such links

index investment and financialization of commodities the authors found that concurrent with the rapidly growing index investment in commodity markets since the early 2000s prices of non energy commodity futures in the united states have become incr

explosive oil prices spectacular oil price increases occur on a regular basis the most recent one is dated july 2008 this paper puts forward the notion that extreme oil price movements of this type can be described as temporary explosive the paper applies a forward recursive unit root tests and finds evidence of explosive behavior in the following periods 1990 1991 2005 2006 and 2007 2008 currently existing oil price models are not capable of appropriately describing this type of behavior a thorough discussion of the underlying reasons of these price hikes indicates these oil price episodes even though extreme are mainly fundamentally explained this finding is insufficiently acknowledged in the literature on speculative oil price bubbles thus policy interventions as response to extreme movements of this kind need to be very carefully thought through

estimating the income price and interest elasticities of housing demand abstract there are many references in the housing market literature that suggest that the housing market contains characteristics of both stock and flows however most studies focus on either the stock or the flow aspect and ignore the simultaneous nature of the stock flow concept in this paper the dual aspect of the housing market is formally incorporated using a stock flow equilibrium model the income price and interest elasticities are then estimated under the condition that both the flow excess demand and the market excess demand are zero

index investment and the financialization of commodities the authors found that concurrent with the rapidly growing index investment in commodity markets since the early 2000s prices of non energy commodity futures in the united states have become increasingly correlated with oil prices this trend has been significantly more pronounced for commodities in two popular commodity indices this finding reflects the financialization of the commodity markets and helps explain the large increase in the price volatility of non energy commodities around 2008

the financialization of food commodity equity and cross commodity return co movements rose dramatically after the 2008 financial crisis this development took place following what has been dubbed the financialization of commodity markets

speculation in the oil market the run up in oil prices since 2004 coincided with growing investment in commodity markets and increased price co movement among different commodities we assess whether speculation in the oil market played a role in driving this salient empirical pattern we identify oil shocks from a large dataset using a dynamic factor model this method is motivated by the fact that a small scale vector autoregression is not informationally sufficient to identify the shocks the main results are as follows i while global demand shocks account for the largest share of oil price fluctuations speculative shocks are the second most important driver ii the increase in oil prices over the last decade is mainly driven by the strength of global demand however speculation played a significant role in the oil price increase between 2004 and 2008 and its subsequent collapse iii the co movement between oil prices and the prices of other commodities is mainly explained by global demand shocks our results support the view that the recent oil price increase is mainly driven by the strength of global demand but that the financialization process of commodity markets also played a role

oil shocks and external balances abstract we provide estimates of the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of oil exporters and oil importers external balances including the oil trade balance the non oil trade balance the current account capital gains and changes in net foreign assets nfa first we show that the effect of oil demand and supply shocks on the merchandise trade balance and the current account which depending on the source of the shock can be large depends critically on the response of the non oil trade balance our results provide evidence of an intermediate degree of international financial integration second we document the presence of large and systematic valuation effects in response to these shocks valuation effects overall tend to cushion the effect of oil demand and supply shocks on the nfa positions of oil exporters and oil importers third we quantify the overall importance of global business cycle demand shocks as well as oil market specific demand and supply shocks for external balances

oil prices and global factor macroeconomic variables abstract this paper investigates the relationship between oil prices global industrial production prices central bank policy interest rate and monetary aggregate with a global factor augmented error correction model we confirm the following stylized relationships i at global level money industrial production and prices are cointegrated ii positive innovation in global oil price is connected with global interest rate tightening iii positive innovation in global money price level and industrial production is connected with an increase in oil prices iv positive innovations in global interest rate are associated with a decline in oil prices and v the u s euro area and china are the main drivers of global macroeconomic factors

institutional adjustment and transaction costs product and inputs markets in the tanzanian coffee system abstract commodity market liberalization can improve incentives for production of export crops by reducing the total costs of transforming products through space form and time or by reducing the costs of arranging and completing transactions while liberalization often leads to reduced costs in output exchange it can remove opportunities for linked input output transactions that sometimes lowered the costs of providing finance in state controlled markets assessments of liberalization that focus on output exchange alone obscure the impact of rising transaction costs in finance this study of liberalization in the tanzanian coffee market documents declining costs in output marketing rising transaction costs for financing farm activities and differential but generally positive net impacts on growers

the impacts of structural oil shocks on macroeconomic uncertainty evidence from a large panel of 45 countries abstract using local projection methods this paper employs monthly panel data from 1989 to 2017 to examine both linear and nonlinear impulse responses of macroeconomic uncertainty to structural shocks to global oil production aggregate demand oil market specific demand and speculative demand in a large group of 45 economies we find that both oil supply and demand shocks are important drivers of uncertainty there is strong evidence that the impacts of oil price shocks on macroeconomic uncertainty are regime dependent and contingent on the states of investor sentiments and perceived volatility in financial markets the responses of economic uncertainty to oil shocks especially demand side shocks appear to experience a dramatic change in the post global financial crisis period

the myth of financial innovation and the great moderation financial innovation is widely believed to be at least partly responsible for the recent financial crisis at the same time there are empirical and theoretical arguments that support the view that changes in financial markets in particular innovations in consumer credit and home mortgages played a role in the great moderation this article questions empirical evidence supporting this view especially the behaviour of aggregate home mortgages changed less during the great moderation than is typically believed a remarkable change we do find is that monetary tightenings became episodes during which financial institutions other than banks increased their mortgages holdings

an exact solution method for binary equilibrium problems with compensation and the power market uplift problem abstract we propose a novel method to find nash equilibria in games with binary decision variables by including compensation payments and incentive compatibility constraints from non cooperative game theory directly into an optimization framework in lieu of using first order conditions of a linearization or relaxation of integrality conditions the reformulation offers a new approach to obtain and interpret dual variables to binary constraints using the benefit or loss from deviation rather than marginal relaxations the method endogenizes the trade off between overall societal efficiency and compensation payments necessary to align incentives of individual players we provide existence results and conditions under which this problem can be solved as a mixed binary linear program we apply the solution approach to a stylized nodal power market equilibrium problem with binary on off decisions this illustrative example shows that our approach yields an exact solution to the binary nash game with compensation we compare different implementations of actual market rules within our model in particular constraints ensuring non negative profits no loss rule and restrictions on the compensation payments to non dispatched generators we discuss the resulting equilibria in terms of overall welfare efficiency and allocational equity

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

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

limits to arbitrage in electricity markets a case study of miso abstract we study the case of financial traders in the midwest electricity market where they are expected to arbitrage price differences that result in inefficiencies using exogenous variation in financial trading from the financial crisis and a period of high transaction costs we show speculators had only a weak effect moreover while arbitrage was restricted by transaction costs imposed by regulation some financial players bet in exactly the opposite direction of the pricing gap sustaining large losses while doing so we show this is consistent with price manipulation intended to increase the value of a related instrument that bets on local price differences ftrs

what do we learn from the price of crude oil futures summary despite their widespread use as predictors of the spot price of oil oil futures prices tend to be less accurate in the mean squared prediction error sense than no change forecasts this result is driven by the variability of the futures price about the spot price as captured by the oil futures spread this variability can be explained by the marginal convenience yield of oil inventories using a two country multi period general equilibrium model of the spot and futures markets for crude oil we show that increased uncertainty about future oil supply shortfalls under plausible assumptions causes the spread to decline increased uncertainty also causes precautionary demand for oil to increase resulting in an immediate increase in the real spot price thus the negative of the oil futures spread may be viewed as an indicator of fluctuations in the price of crude oil driven by precautionary demand an empirical analysis of this indicator provides evidence of how shifts in the uncertainty about future oil supply shortfalls affect the real spot price of crude oil copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

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

impacts of prices and transactions costs on input usage in a liberalizing economy evidence from tanzanian coffee growers despite improvements in production incentives agricultural output in africa remained sluggish through the 1990s low use of purchased inputs may be part of the cause of persistently low productivity in african agriculture this article analyzes the roles of relative prices and transactions costs in explaining low use of chemical inputs among tanzanian coffee growers a sample selection model indicates that output prices exert great influence on input purchases and that both fixed and variable transactions costs affect input use decisions travel costs in input and output markets have distinct effects on input usage implying distinct avenues for interventions to promote more intensive use of agricultural inputs

commodity price comovement and financial speculation the case of cotton recent booms and busts in commodity prices have generated concerns that financial speculation causes excessive commodity price comovement driving prices away from levels implied by supply and demand under rational expectations we develop a structural vector autoregression model of a commodity futures market and use it to explain two recent spikes in cotton prices in doing so we make two contributions to the literature on commodity price dynamics first we estimate the extent to which cotton price booms and busts can be attributed to comovement with other commodities finding such comovement would be necessary but would not be sufficient evidence to establish that broad based financial speculation drives commodity prices second after controlling for aggregate demand and comovement we develop a new method to point identify shocks to precautionary demand for cotton separately from shocks to current supply and demand to do so we use differences in volatility across time implied by the rational expectations competitive storage model we find limited evidence that financial speculation caused cotton prices to spike in 2008 or 2011 we conclude that the 2008 price spike was driven mostly by precautionary demand for cotton and the 2011 spike was caused by a net supply shortfall

time varying persistence in real oil prices and its determinant abstract we provide empirical evidence for pronounced time variation in the persistence of real oil prices in particular we find episodes of mild explosiveness next to periods with random walk and also mean reverting behavior we address the question whether dynamic persistence can be directly related to macro financial variables spot futures spreads spill over effects from commodities and global real economic activity alongside these variables we use a large data set of more than one hundred fifty potential determinants featuring for example further oil related variables production and inventories and key macroeconomic series for the g7 countries by using model averaging techniques we robustly account for the inherent model uncertainty when dealing with such many potential explanatory variables as it turns out the one and only significant measure to explain time varying oil price persistence is the index of global real economic activity by kilian 2009 other variables related to e g supply shocks or speculation are however insignificant in line with recent findings we argue that fundamentals rather than speculation were the drivers of the explosive oil price in the 2000s

modeling technology adoption in developing countries an analysis of technology adoption decisions by poor farmers is provided some possible empirical models for studying technology adoption are reviewed the issue of theoretical consistency is dealt with in terms of the costs of such consistency measured in data needs and model complexity and the benefits measured in terms of understanding the micro economic foundations of adoption

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

cross country differences in the effects of oil shocks abstract we compare the macroeconomic consequences of several types of oil shocks across a set of industrialized countries that are structurally very diverse with respect to the role of oil and other forms of energy in the economy the results crucially depend on the underlying source of the oil price shift when a rise in oil prices is caused by increased global economic activity or a rise in oil specific demand almost all countries experience respectively a temporary increase and transitory decline of real gdp the role of oil and other forms of energy cannot explain the differences in the effects of both shocks across countries in contrast this role is very important to explain asymmetries in the effects of exogenous oil supply shocks whereas net oil and energy importing countries typically face a permanent fall in economic activity the impact is insignificant or even positive in net energy exporting countries in addition countries that improved their net energy position the most over time became less vulnerable to oil supply shocks relative to other countries

heterogeneous beliefs regret and uncertainty the role of speculation in energy price dynamics abstract this paper proposes to investigate the impact of financialization on energy markets oil gas coal and electricity european forward prices during both normal times and periods of extreme fluctuation by using an original behavioral and emotional approach with this aim we propose a new theoretical and empirical framework based on a heterogeneous agents model in which fundamentalists and chartists co exist and are subject to regret and uncertainty we find significant evidence that energy markets are composed of heterogeneous traders who behave differently depending on the intensity of the price fluctuations and the uncertainty context in particular energy prices are governed primarily by fundamental and chartist agents that are neutral to uncertainty during normal times whereas these prices face irrational chartist investors averse to uncertainty during periods of extreme fluctuations in this context the recent surge in energy prices can be viewed as the consequence of irrational exuberance our new theoretical model is suitable for modeling energy price dynamics and outperforms both the random walk and the arma model in out of sample predictive ability

drawing conclusions from structural vector autoregressions identified on the basis of sign restrictions abstract this paper discusses the problems associated with using information about the signs of certain magnitudes as a basis for drawing structural conclusions in vector autoregressions we also review available tools to solve these problems for illustration we use dahlhaus and vasishtha s 2019 study of the effects of a u s monetary contraction on capital flows to emerging markets we explain why sign restrictions alone are not enough to allow us to answer the question and suggest alternative approaches that could be used

de financialization of commodities evidence from stock crude oil and natural gas markets abstract in order to investigate whether the crude oil and natural gas market volatility is influenced by the volatility in the stock market or whether these different variables move all together we introduce the volatility threshold dynamic conditional correlations vt dcc approach to investigate the spillover effect of stock market volatility index vix vstoxx on crude oil and natural gas markets during 1999 2015 and make the correlation dynamics dependent on conditional variance values through a threshold grid search algorithm by detecting one endogenous break point in the raw series we identify two clusters one in 2008 and another in 2014 due to the financial crisis and the structural low oil prices linked to changing fundamentals respectively also the u s henry hub gas seems to be associated with the stock market volatility indexes contrary to the european nbp gas which is linked to the brent besides regarding the volatility behaviors of our series the four energy variables violate their thresholds at similar moments and the stock market vix and vstoxx exhibit logically similarities co movements are detectable as well between the vix and crude oil series when investigating the volatility extracted from the garch model in addition the block dcc estimates provide ample evidence of similarities in the correlation dynamics between the crude oil and stock volatility series it should be noted that the modeling framework proposed in this paper represents a useful tool for the study of cross market contagion

an empirical analysis of fertilizer use in pakistan one of the stylized facts in developing countries is the wide variation in agricultural per acre input and output levels across farm households here we focus on the variation in the level of chemical fertilizer applied in particular to high yielding wheat the model used to explain the variation in fertilizer input across farms incorporates the process by which zeros are generated in particular differentiating between households who do not apply because of lack of access and those who do not apply out of choice we find that access is positively correlated with farm size but that among users per acre fertilizer levels decrease with farm size we interpret the latter by appealing to input choice under uncertainty with this interpretation our results suggest that although larger farms have a higher level of non stochastic wealth which in the presence of decreasing absolute risk aversion has the effect of increasing fertilizer intensity with farm size the presence of increasing relative risk aversion means that the net relationship between farm size and fertilizer intensity is negative this latter affect appears to dominate any tendancy for higher fertilizer intensity on larger farms arising from better knowledge or irrigation facilities

transactions costs and agricultural household supply response we develop and estimate a model of supply response when transactions costs create a situation where some producers buy others sell and others do not participate in markets we present two rationales for why producing households may have different relationships to the market proportional and fixed transactions costs using data on mexican corn producers we estimate an empirical model that allows for separate tests of the significance of both types of transactions costs revealing that both fixed and proportional transactions costs matter for the estimation the results provide consistent estimates of supply elasticity and measures of the relative importance of factors determining both proportional and fixed transactions costs

an empirical analysis of the relationship between oil prices and the chinese macro economy using the quarterly data from the first quarter of 1996 to the fourth quarter of 2014 this paper studies the relationship between oil prices and the chinese macro economy we find output and interest rate respond significantly to oil price shocks further analysis reveals that the positive response of output to oil price shocks is attributed to the influences of oil price shocks on exports the oil price shocks have both longer and deeper effects on the exports of state owned enterprises than on those of foreign investment enterprises moreover the response of exports to oil price shocks is symmetric finally oil prices are found to be useful for forecasting the china s exports in the periods shorter than about two years

landscape preferences and patterns of residential development abstract i analyze a model of residential location choice where people derive utility from their proximity to open space when people have such landscape preferences then 1 equilibrium residential development is mixed with undeveloped land 2 equilibrium land price gradients depend sensitively on how land markets are organized are not generally monotonic and may or may not reflect the value of open space and 3 dynamic equilibria generally have the property that more remote areas are developed before more central areas finally when compared to optimal development equilibrium development houses too many residents too close together and remote areas are developed too soon these results imply that equilibrium development may not be sprawling enough and that policies to encourage infill development are not welfare improving

transport costs and smallholder cropping choices an application to siaya district kenya smallholders regularly devote shares of resources to low yielding food crops than they do to cash crops that have higher market returns in this paper costly exchange is incorporated into an agricultural household model and a numerical nonseparable version of the model is used to show that seemingly inefficient cropping choices of this type in siaya district kenya can be explained as rational food import substitution given high transport costs in product markets improved rural road networks that reduce these costs could abate motives to meet food needs through domestic production and promote specialization that raises farm incomes

disentangling the determinants of real oil prices in this study we quantify the impacts of economic fundamentals and derivative market speculation on the real price of crude oil using a structural var with sign restriction we determine that oil demand from the us and china particularly the latter one plays a crucial role in oil price changes after the year 2000 the contribution of speculation does not exceed 10 of oil price variations in our sample period

commodity prices interest rates and the dollar this paper sheds light on recent fluctuations in commodity prices we investigate whether a decline in real interest rates and the us dollar contributes to higher commodity prices and whether commodity prices display overshooting behavior in response to changes in real interest rates we analyze the behavior of real prices of crude oil food metals and industrial raw materials the analysis is based on structural var models estimated on quarterly data over the period 1990q1 2007q4 our results suggest that commodity prices increase significantly in response to reductions in real interest rates moreover oil prices and prices of industrial raw materials tend to display overshooting behavior in response to such interest rate changes the evidence also suggests that a weaker dollar leads to higher commodity prices shocks to interest rates and the dollar are found to account for substantial shares of fluctuations in commodity prices

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

the application and economic interpretation of selectivity models substantial differences in economic interpretations may be inferred from the estimated selectivity model results using the demand for frozen concentrated orange juice fcoj as an example the study suggests that the consumption patterns are quite similar between national brand and private label when the marginal effects and elasticities are evaluated based on actual observations rather than unobserved latent variables results show that private label fcoj is considered as a normal inferior good if the income effect is assessed based on actual potential purchases the estimated cents off elasticities for private label fcoj also vary substantially depending on which approach is used

dynamic reserve selection optimal land retention with land price feedbacks urban growth compromises open space and ecosystem functions to mitigate the negative effects some agencies use reserve selection models to identify conservation sites for purchase or retention existing models assume that conservation has no impact on nearby land prices we propose a new integer program that relaxes this assumption via adaptive cost coefficients our model accounts for the two key land price feedbacks that arise in markets where conservation competes with development the amenity premium and price increases driven by shifts in market equilibriums we illustrate the mechanics of the proposed model in a real land retention context the results suggest that in competitive land markets the optimal conservation strategy during the initial phase of the retention effort might be to use available dollars to buy fewer parcels with smaller total area that are under high risk of development we show that failure to capture the land price feedbacks can lead to significant losses in biological conservation the present study is the first to create a reserve selection model that captures the economic theory of competitive land markets in a dynamic framework produces tangible parcel level conservation recommendations and works on problems with thousands of potential site selection decisions and several planning periods

a duration model of irreversible oil investment theory and empirical evidence the aim of this paper is to analyse the implications of the theory of irreversible investment under uncertainty for investment in oil fields on the united kingdom continental shelf ukcs we consider the problem of an operator who owns a licence to develop and extract oil from a field of known capacity an intertemporal optimization model in discrete time is developed to derive decision rules for the timing of the irreversible development investment and for the optimal rate of extraction model simulation is then used to describe the properties of the numerical solutions the predictions of the theory on the determinants of the irreversible investment decision are then examined using statistical duration analysis data on the length of the time period between discovery and development are available for individual fields on the ukcs we measure the duration of the irreversible investment gestation lag for each field and test the model by assessing the significance of the theoretical variables in explaining the significance of such a lag both our theoretical model and our empirical results suggest the importance of a nonlinear interaction of the level of oil prices and the volatility of oil prices in determining the development lag the simulation of our theoretical model shows a nonlinear impact of oil price volatility on the trigger level of oil prices our empirical results suggest that the effect of price volatility is a function of the expected price level with increased price volatility having a positive impact on the duration of investment appraisal when expected prices are low and a negative impact when they are high

monetary policy with sectoral trade offs we formulate a two sector new keynesian economy that features sectoral heterogeneity along three main dimensions price stickiness consumption goods durability and the inter sectoral trade of input materials the combination of these factors deeply affects inter sectoral and intra sectoral stabilization in this context we examine the welfare properties of simple rules that adjust the policy rate in response to the output gap and alternative measures of final goods price inflation aggregating durable and non durable goods prices depending on the relative frequency of sectoral price setting may induce a severe bias due to factor demand linkages the cost of production in one sector is influenced by price setting in the other sector of the economy as a result measures of aggregate inflation that weigh sectoral price dynamics based on the relative degree of price rigidity do not allow the central bank to keep track of the effective speeds of sectoral price adjustment

the time path of scarcity rent in the theory of exhaustible resources there is now a consensus in the literature on resource economics that a depletable resource should command a price in excess of its marginal extraction cost simply to reflect the opportunity cost of using a unit of it today rather that conserving it for the future but how this excess is to change along an optimal or competitive equilibrium path of resource use is still an unresolved question this might at first seem puzzling since according to the fundamental theorem of economics of exhaustible resources or hotelling i 93 i rule on an optimal path price minus marginal extraction cost also termed interchangeably as scarcity rent user cost or royalty should steadily grow over time at the social rate of discount however the literature contains sharply contrasting views on the subject for example kay and mirrlees 1975 have argued that since along an optimal path the scarcity rent grows exponentially as a finite stock of a resourcexnears exhaustion then situations in which the resource stock is still very large and yet the price greatly exceeds the marginal extraction cost should indicate that the price is significantly above its optimal level and that the resource is overconserved in stark contrast to this view heal i976 has argued that as the resource stock nears exhaustion the difference between price and marginal cost or what he termed social cost of extraction falls monotonically to zero hanson i980 analyses the same model as heal s but unlike heal who assumes the unit extraction cost to be convex he postulates it to be concave and yet like heal concludes that the scarcity rent will be monotonically declining over time solow and wan i976 analyse a still different situation where resource deposits differ in quality and the unit extraction cost increases as higher grade deposits are exhausted and extraction proceeds to lower grades they show that along an optimal path the shadow price of a resource must rise at the real rate of interest despite differential extraction costs but that the difference between price and the marginal extraction cost or what they call degradation charge declines monotonically over time to zero these sharply differing conclusions suggest that far from being resolved the question of how scarcity rent changes over time is much in want of a close scrutiny the need for such a scrutiny becomes even stronger once it is noted

understanding recent oil price dynamics a novel empirical approach crude oil is a major driver of the global economy and its price dynamics are a key indicator for producers consumers and investors the increasing volatility of crude oil prices in the last decade has encouraged many researchers to model its dynamics recent studies have tried to explain this dynamics by taking into account the role of various market participants many of whom have increasingly used crude oil for portfolio diversification we propose a modified supply demand framework which assumes that the real price of crude oil is affected not only by fundamental shocks but also by financial shocks we assess the role of what we define as the financial shock component when describing the dynamics of the real crude oil price and endeavor to measure a possible equilibrium relationship between standard supply demand variables and our financial shock component using a dynamic ordinary least squares dols approach and an ecm framework we are able to empirically assess the significant role of hedging pressure on the real price of oil and find evidence that the impact of the hedging pressure is not only affecting quick reverting short term deviations but also the structural long run equilibrium of the oil price

are kenyan farmers under utilizing fertilizer implications for input intensification strategies and research abstract it is widely perceived that african farmers are under utilizing inorganic fertilizer however very little long term evidence from farmers fields accounting for variations in agro ecological conditions has been assembled to back this claim or determine the conditions under which it is true using five waves of nationwide household survey data from kenya covering 13 years we estimate the relative and absolute profitability of nitrogen application rates on maize fields and compare these profitability conditions to observed nitrogen use patterns over time in general we find that farmers are consistently and steadily increasing towards risk adjusted economically optimal rates of fertilizer application over time and that in the most agriculturally productive areas farmers application rates on maize sometimes exceed rates that maximize profitability fertilizer use rates may nevertheless be profitably raised in these areas but doing so will require the adoption of complementary inputs and management practices that raise maize response rates to fertilizer application this motivates a more holistic approach to input intensification strategies in the region

expectations and commodity price dynamics the overshooting model monetary policy has important effects on agricultural commodity prices because though they are flexible other goods prices are sticky this paper formalizes the argument by applying the dornbusch overshooting model a decline in the nominal money supply is a decline in the real money supply in the short run it raises the real interest rate which depresses real commodity prices they overshoot their new equilibrium in order to generate an expectation of future appreciation sufficient to offset the higher interest rate these real effects which vanish in the long run also result from a decline in the money growth rate

which determinant is the most informative in forecasting crude oil market volatility fundamental speculation or uncertainty abstract this paper aims to identify the most informative determinant in forecasting crude oil market volatility we use a new garch class model based on mixed data sampling regression and the dynamic model averaging combination method to examine the predicting power of the determinants we integrate both the global economic policy uncertainty gepu indices and several national economic policy uncertainty epu indices with traditional determinants such as global oil demand supply and speculation our analysis suggests that the epu indices comprehensively integrate the information contained in other determinants specifically gepu indices and the u s s epu index have superior predictive powers for west texas intermediate spot oil volatility this finding highlights the importance of epu indices implying that they are key factors to consider when determining crude oil market volatility

macroeconomic forecasting using diffusion indexes this article studies forecasting a macroeconomic time series variable using a large number of predictors the predictors are summarized using a small number of indexes constructed by principal component analysis an approximate dynamic factor model serves as the statistical framework for the estimation of the indexes and construction of the forecasts the method is used to construct 6 12 and 24 monthahead forecasts for eight monthly u s macroeconomic time series using 215 predictors in simulated real time from 1970 through 1998 during this sample period these new forecasts outperformed univariate autoregressions small vector autoregressions and leading indicator models

the relation between farm size and farm productivity the role of family labor supervision and credit constraints abstract the paper shows that if the performance of hired farmhands is affected by supervision from family members and if the availability of credit is dependent on the amount of land owned then a systematic positive or negative relationship between per acre yields and farm size will prevail a model with no supervision effects on labor productivity would predict that yields are unaffected by farm size the paper also investigates the relation between land utilization and owned holding size when land rental possibilities are limited results are shown to be compatible with various observed patterns in ldcs