crisis or opportunity economic degrowth for social equity and ecological sustainability introduction to this special issue abstract this article reviews the burgeoning emerging literature on sustainable degrowth this is defined as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level in the short and long term the paradigmatic propositions of degrowth are that economic growth is not sustainable and that human progress without economic growth is possible degrowth proponents come from diverse origins some are critics of market globalization new technologies or the imposition of western models of development in the rest of the world all criticize gdp accounting though they propose often different social and ecological indicators degrowth theorists and practitioners support an extension of human relations instead of market relations demand a deepening of democracy defend ecosystems and propose a more equal distribution of wealth we distinguish between depression i e unplanned degrowth within a growth regime and sustainable degrowth a voluntary smooth and equitable transition to a regime of lower production and consumption the question we ask is how positive would degrowth be if instead of being imposed by an economic crisis it would actually be a democratic collective decision a project with the ambition of getting closer to ecological sustainability and socio environmental justice worldwide most articles in this issue were originally presented at the april 2008 conference in paris on economic degrowth for ecological sustainability and social equity this conference brought the word degrowth and the concepts around it into an international academic setting articles of this special issue are summarized in this introductory article hueting d alessandro and colleagues van den bergh kerschner spangenberg and alcott discuss whether current growth patterns are un sustainable and offer different perspectives on what degrowth might mean and whether and under what conditions it might be desirable matthey and hamilton focus on social dynamics and the obstacles and opportunities for voluntary social action towards degrowth lietaert and cattaneo with gavalda offer a down to earth empirical discussion of two practical living experiments cohousing and squats highlighting the obstacles for scaling up such alternatives finally van griethuysen explains why growth is an imperative in modern market economies raising also the question whether degrowth is possible without radical institutional changes

forecasting crude oil price movements with oil sensitive stocks this paper uses monthly data from 1984 m10 to 2012 m8 to show that oil sensitive stock price indices particularly those in the energy sector have strong power in predicting nominal and real crude oil prices at short horizons one month ahead predictions using both in and out of sample tests in particular the forecasts based on oil sensitive stock price indices are able to outperform significantly the no change forecasts for example using the nyse arca amex oil index as a predictor the one month ahead forecasts for nominal crude oil prices reduce the mean squared prediction error by between 22 for the west texas intermediate oil price and 28 for the dubai oil price moreover we find that the directional forecast based the amex oil index is ignificantly better than a 50 50 coin toss the novelty of this analysis is that it proposes a new and valuable predictor that both reflects timely market information and is readily available for forecasting the spot oil price

oil price shocks and gdp growth do energy shares amplify causal effects abstract the paper estimates the effect of oil price fluctuations on gdp growth using linear and nonlinear var models with data from 12 countries by using an ivar approach it reports strong significance for the existence of non linear moderator effects caused by a decline in the oil to energy share which weakens the causal effect of oil prices on economic growth a consideration of the relationship of oil prices and gdp over 44 years confirms the exclusion of symmetry of previous studies moreover the paper indicates that the effect of negative oil price movements is causal for more countries than has been suggested so far

reputation with equal discounting in repeated games with strictly conflicting interests we analyze reputation effects in two player repeated games of strictly conflicting interests in such games player 1 has a commitment action such that a best reply to it gives player 1 the highest individually rational payoff and player 2 the minmax payoff players have equal discount factors with positive probability player 1 is a type who chooses the commitment action after every history we show that player 1 s payoff converges to the maximally feasible payoff when the discount factor converges to one this contrasts with failures of reputation effects for equal discount factors that have been demonstrated in the literature journal of economic literature classification number c71

co2 emissions and income dynamics what does the global evidence tell us this paper analyzes the co evolution of two major determinants of social welfare namely income and carbon emissions in particular by using a distribution dynamics approach based on markov chains we investigate the shape and behavior of the joint distribution of per capita income and carbon dioxide emissions we arrive at several interesting conclusions especially in the context of international negotiations on climate change first evidence does not support theoretical models predicting the existence of a poverty environment trap specifically in the long run two main groups of countries will emerge poor versus polluting countries second the typical development path leads initially to high emission levels and subsequently to high income third the convergence process towards the stationary distribution is very slow finally for carbon emissions whenever it is observed the environmental kuznets curve seems to be only a transitory phenomenon

a two sided reputation result with long run players abstract we establish reputation results under two sided incomplete information for a class of repeated games we consider a repeated game that satisfies the assumptions of either atakan and ekmekci 2012 3 or cripps et al 2005 6 and we assume that both players are stackelberg types with positive probability if the stage game is not a common interest game then equilibrium play converges to the unique equilibrium of a continuous time war of attrition as the stage game is repeated arbitrarily frequently alternatively if the stage game is a common interest game then the players equilibrium payoffs converge to their highest payoffs as the stage game is repeated arbitrarily frequently

does high frequency crude oil futures data contain useful information for predicting volatility in the us stock market new evidence abstract this study examines whether high frequency crude oil futures data contain useful information to forecast the realized volatility rv of the us stock market from both in and out of sample perspectives there are several significant findings first from the in sample analysis crude oil futures rv exhibits a significant positive impact on the future s p 500 volatility second the out of sample results reveal that the prediction models including crude oil futures rv outperform the related competing models implying that crude oil rv is an important predictive factor for the us stock market third we further find that the primary forecasting ability of crude oil rv is reflected in high frequency information negative crude oil rv and high volatility level finally the out of sample empirical results based on different forecasting windows alternative forecast evaluation approaches subsample analysis different prediction models alternative midas lags and controlling the leverage effect are robust to our conclusions

do exchange rates respond asymmetrically to shocks in the crude oil market abstract the paper argues that exchange rates respond asymmetrically to different shocks to the crude oil market we apply kilian s 2009 methodology to disentangle shocks to the crude oil market into distinct demand and supply shocks and examine the response of the u s real and nominal trade weighted u s dollar exchange rate indexes as well as six other bilateral exchange rates to these shocks our analysis indicates that oil supply shocks have no significant effects on exchange rates while global aggregate demand and oil specific demand shocks lead to depreciations we further show that exchange rates respond asymmetrically to shocks in the crude market depending on whether the shocks are large versus small or positive versus negative

the threat of rent extraction in a resource constrained future abstract ecological economists aim to transform our economic institutions so that society can flourish within planetary boundaries the central message of this article is that private rent extraction forms a key barrier to the realisation of that goal i define rent as an economic reward which is sustained through control of assets that cannot be quickly and widely replicated and which exceeds proportionate compensation for the labour of the recipient i argue that unless we close opportunities for rent extraction and socialise unavoidable rents our governments will be compelled to pursue output growth regardless of its environmental consequences in order to prevent spiralling inequality and unemployment the positive proposition in this article is that the concept of rent can help us to identify and build democratic support for the institutional transformations necessary to prepare for a resource constrained future measures to reduce and redistribute rentier power could be emancipatory for the poorest in society whilst making more feasible many proposals that have been advocated already in this journal including reduced working hours and resource caps by contrast if environmental protections are introduced before opportunities for private rent extraction are closed we could see intensified rent seeking asset price bubbles poverty and economic insecurity

the time varying effect of oil price shocks on euro area exports abstract in this paper we provide novel evidence on changes in the relationship between the real price of oil and real exports in the euro area by combining robust predictions on the sign of the impulse responses obtained from a theoretical model with restrictions on the slope of the oil demand and oil supply curves we identify oil supply and foreign productivity shocks in a time varying var with stochastic volatility we find that from the 1980s onwards the relationship between oil prices and euro area exports has become less negative conditional on oil supply shortfalls and more positive conditional on foreign productivity shocks using the theoretical model we show that our empirical findings can be accounted for by i stronger trade relationship between the euro area and emerging economies ii a decrease in the share of oil in production and iii increased competitive pressures in the product market

on real and sticky price theories of the business cycle after presenting some facts about the growth of government in western industrialized countries possible causes of this development are analyzed from a public choice perspective next some empirically tested theories which seek to explain this growth are discussed finally possible consequences for efficiency and individual liberty are examined it is shown that both the number and size of interest groups age of democracy as stated by mancur olson 1982 and the increasing share of government expenditure in gdp seem to exert a negative influence on the growth rate of gdp copyright 1986 by ohio state university press

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

a folk theorem for bayesian games with commitment the set of all bayesian nash equilibrium payoffs that the players can achieve by making conditional commitments at the interim stage of a bayesian game coincides with the set of all feasible incentive compatible and interim individually rational payoffs of the bayesian game furthermore the various equilibrium payoffs which are achieved by means of different commitment devices are also the equilibrium payoffs of a universal deterministic commitment game

should oil prices receive so much attention an evaluation of the predictive power of oil prices for the u s economy i introduction oil prices are monitored by consumers firms financial market traders and government officials and are the subject of much media coverage this in large part reflects the view that higher oil prices tend to be followed by inflation and recessions 1 early work by hamilton 1983 as well as recent papers by hamilton 2003 and lee and ni 2002 have provided convincing evidence of a relationship between oil prices and future economic activity 2 much of the literature has focused on whether oil prices improve the fit of a benchmark model via examination of impulse response functions as done by lee and ni 2002 or hypothesis testing as done by hamilton 2003 guo and kliesen 2005 discussed a number of theoretical explanations for the oil price macroeconomy relationship the textbook explanation is that higher oil prices represent an increase in production costs causing a fall in output and higher inflation another strand of literature has argued that large oil price movements cause uncertainty about future oil prices or costly reallocation of labor 3 causing large oil price movements to have asymmetric effects on the economy even to the point that both positive and negative oil price movements hurt output along these lines hamilton 1996 motivated the construction of a net oil price increase nopi variable by arguing that it is the behavior of oil prices relative to recent experience that matters this implies that the only time oil shocks have an impact on gross domestic product gdp is when the price of oil is above the high of the previous year for many purposes though the relevant question is whether the information in oil prices can be used to improve forecasts of macroeconomic variables examples include federal reserve policymaking using the price of oil as an indicator variable private sector planning and portfolio management for these applications it should be of interest to evaluate the historical out of sample forecast performance of models that include oil prices moreover impulse response functions and hypothesis tests are not able to provide information about how much out of sample forecasts can be improved 4 this paper evaluates forecasts of different measures of output inflation and monetary policy all of which are important macroeconomic variables that can plausibly be expected to respond to oil shocks based on both economic theory and media reports we apply standard out of sample predictive ability tests to data covering the period january 1986 to december 2004 this time period has seen substantial variation in the price of oil from a low of 11 per barrel in late 1998 to a high of 53 per barrel in october 2004 and includes two gulf wars as well as multiple boom and bust cycles if oil prices have value as an indicator variable it should clearly be present in our sample as oil price fluctuations of this magnitude will explain a large proportion of the variance of the macroeconomic variables our results suggest that there are few cases where models with oil prices are even able to improve upon the forecasts of simple autoregressive ar models this finding is robust to changes in specification that allow for nonlinearities the use of rolling estimation windows to account for possible parameter instability the use of industry level data and changes in the forecast horizon to ensure that our results are not due to low power of the predictive ability tests that we employ we show that the potential forecasting gains from including oil prices are in most cases close to 0 we conclude that oil prices provide little information about the future direction of the economy the rest of the paper proceeds as follows the next section describes our methodology section iii describes the data section iv presents and discusses the results of tests for predictive ability of oil prices for the macroeconomic variables and section v concludes the paper

bargaining and reputation the paper develops a reputation based theory of bargaining the idea is to investigate and highlight the influence of bargaining postures on bargaining outcomes a complete information bargaining model a la rubinstein is amended to accommodate irrational types who are obstinate and indeed for tractability assumed to be completely inflexible in their offers and demands a strong independence of procedures result is derived after initial postures have been adopted the bargaining outcome is independent of the fine details of the bargaining protocol so long as both players have the opportunity to make offers frequently the latter analysis yields a unique continuous time limit with a war of attrition structure in the continuous time game equilibrium is unique and entails delay consequently inefficiency the equilibrium outcome reflects the combined influence of the rates of time preference of the players and the ex ante probabilities of different irrational types as the probability of irrationality goes to zero delay and inefficiency disappear furthermore if there is a rich set of types for both agents the limit equilibrium payoffs are inversely proportional to their rates of time preference

from constraint to sufficiency the decoupling of energy and carbon from human needs 1975 2005 abstract we investigate the relationship between human needs energy consumption and carbon emissions for several indicators of human development life expectancy literacy income and the human development index we find that high human development can be achieved at moderate energy and carbon levels increasing energy and carbon past this level does not necessarily contribute to higher living standards by conducting a novel longitudinal analysis from 1975 to 2005 we observe a previously undetected decoupling of the per capita energy and carbon required for human needs if resources were equally distributed current energy and carbon levels would be more than sufficient to satisfy global human needs at high levels of human development by projecting current trends to 2030 we demonstrate that the global energy consumption and carbon emissions required to satisfy human needs will decrease with time despite growth in population

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

crude oil and the macroeconomy tests of some popular notions a note perhaps no other economic events in the post world war ii era have generated as much attention as the series of crude oil price shocks that have jolted the world economy since the opec boycott of 1973 a tremendous amount of space in the popular and professional literature has been devoted to analyzing the impacts of these shocks on the developed economies and the adjustments these shocks have induced one residual of this literature has been a general impression that since 1973 the functional relationship between crude oil prices and the developed macroeconomies has been dramatically and fundamentally altered yet to our knowledge no one has formally tested this impression recent evidence of hamilton 1983 suggests that crude oil prices had a strong impact on the u s business cycle well before 1973 further while textbook treatments of oil price shocks tend to highlight cost push inflationary effects the research of berndt and wood 1975 1979 and wilcox 1983 indicates the net complementarity between energy and capital in the u s economy is quite strong both before and after 1973 thus oil price shocks may have stronger real effects than generally believed in this paper we formally test three popular notions associated with the so called

crude oil price volatility and short term predictability of the real u s gdp growth rate abstract the predictive power contained in crude oil price volatility with regards to forecasting the real u s gdp growth rate is evaluated contrary to models based on the price of crude oil specifications employing crude oil price volatility tend to afford statistically significant improvements in terms of population level predictability and finite sample forecast accuracy relative to the benchmark at the one quarter ahead horizon

sectoral shifts and cyclical unemployment a substantial fraction of cyclical unemployment is better characterized as fluctuations of the frictional or natural rate than as deviations from some relatively stable natural rate shifts of employment demand between sectors of the economy necessitate continuous labor reallocation since it takes time for workers to find new jobs some unemployment is unavoidable this paper presents evidence that most of the unemployment fluctuations of the seventies unlike those in the sixties were induced by unusual structural shifts within the u s economy simple time series models of layoffs and unemployment are constructed that include a measure of structural shifts within the labor market these models are estimated and a derived natural rate series is constructed

do oil prices help forecast u s real gdp the role of nonlinearities and asymmetries there is a long tradition of using oil prices to forecast u s real gdp it has been suggested that the predictive relationship between the price of oil and one quarter ahead u s real gdp is nonlinear in that a oil price increases matter only to the extent that they exceed the maximum oil price in recent years and that b oil price decreases do not matter at all we examine first whether the evidence of in sample predictability in support of this view extends to out of sample forecasts second we discuss how to extend this forecasting approach to higher horizons third we compare the resulting class of nonlinear models to alternative economically plausible nonlinear specifications and examine which aspect of the model is most useful for forecasting we show that the asymmetry embodied in commonly used nonlinear transformations of the price of oil is not helpful for out of sample forecasting more robust and often more accurate real gdp forecasts are obtained from symmetric nonlinear models based

are the macroeconomic effects of oil price shock symmetric a factor augmented vector autoregressive approach abstract this paper aims to examine the asymmetric effect of oil price shocks on real economic activity in the u s within the context of a nonlinear factor augmented vector autoregressive favar model by employing simulation methods we trace the effects of positive and negative oil price shocks on the macroeconomic variables through the impulse response function irf it is found that the negative impacts of higher oil prices are larger than the positive effects of lower oil prices and the asymmetric effects are more evident when the oil price shocks are larger the results are robust to different lag specification and choice of factors

the seven sisters versus opec solving the mystery of the petroleum market structure abstract this paper provides an explanation of the changing behavior of the crude oil market and tests it using the u s data from january 1913 to september 2014 we claim that the crude oil market has experienced two important structural breaks in its industrial organization the first occurred when venezuela and the arab crude oil exporting countries forced the so called seven sisters to sign the fifty fifty profit sharing agreements the second occurred after opec succeeded in cracking the secrets of the international crude oil marketing and in undertaking the wave of nationalizations of the 1970s

the wellbeing consumption paradox happiness health income and carbon emissions in growing versus non growing economies abstract we investigate the relationships between carbon intensive consumption and two dimensions of human wellbeing physical health and happiness for 120 countries over the 2005 2015 period long term 10 year relationships are analysed to re assess the happiness income paradox i e easterlin paradox which states that changes in national income and happiness are correlated in the short term but not in the long term we broaden the scope of easterlin s analysis in two novel ways first the evidence for a health income paradox is explored second a parallel analysis using national consumption based carbon footprints instead of income is conducted to explore complementary relationships with both of the wellbeing indicators we show that countries with declining per capita consumption measured in terms of either gross domestic product gdp or carbon footprint have significant reductions in average happiness in contrast countries with growing per capita consumption have no significant change in happiness there is no relationship between changes in per capita consumption and health irrespective of whether gdp or carbon footprint is growing or not these findings apply to rich and poor countries alike and are robust to the inclusion of other social indicators such as social support and autonomy we find that happiness is less sensitive to declines in carbon footprint than declines in gdp thus lending support to calls for decoupling carbon emissions from economic growth however observed decoupling trends are insufficient to meet climate targets if the 2 target is to be met without a decline in wellbeing then either decoupling must be vastly improved or happiness levels must be made less sensitive to declining consumption

estimating and forecasting the real prices of crude oil a data rich model using a dynamic model averaging dma approach given that oil price fluctuations have been of great interest for macroeconomics in the recent years due to its important implications for future inflation economic growth and policy making the aim of this paper is to estimate and forecast west texas intermediate wti crude oil prices using a large monthly dataset that covers the period from march 1983 to december 2011 to achieve this aim forecasting with factor models offers a usual approach that utilizes large datasets however a forecasting model which simply includes all factors in state space equation and does not allow for time varying may be not suitable with a highly volatile market such as oil market to overcome these limitations an approach that accounts both for parameter and model uncertainty is employed in particular this study uses the dynamic model averaging dma approach suggested by koop and korobilis 2012 the key element of the dma approach is that it allows both for model and parameter to vary at each point of time by doing so the dma is robust to structural breaks empirical findings show that dma approach outperforms any other alternative model used in the forecasting exercise results also show that there is model but not parameter variation in this oil price forecasting exercise finally the findings suggest that the dma approach provides a better proxy of expected spot prices than future prices

nonzero sum two person repeated games with incomplete information and known own payoffs this paper deals with repeated games with incomplete information where the uninformed player has complete knowledge of his own payoffs this is a specific case of hart s model we provide a characterization of the set of equilibrium payoffs which is simpler than that of the general case and prove the existence of an equilibrium in addition we show by example how arbitrarily small doubts about the payoff matrices can radically alter the set of equilibrium payoffs in particular we partially characterize how a player can increase his minimum equilibrium payoff by sowing doubt about his payoffs journal of economic literature classification number c72

a neoclassical model of unemployment and the business cycle this paper investigates a general equilibrium model of unemployment and the business cycle in which specialization of labor plays a key role a rational expectations equilibrium with fully flexible wages and prices can exhibit unemployment in which the marginal product of employed workers exceeds the reservation wage of those who are without jobs workers are unemployed either because they are in the process of relocating for a better job or because they are waiting for conditions in the depressed sector to improve moreover seemingly small disruptions in the supplies of primary commodities such as energy could be the source of fluctuations in aggregate employment and can exert surprisingly large effects on real output

the effects of the corporate average fuel efficiency standards in the us this paper examines the effects of the corporate average fuel economy standards cafe on automobile sales prices and fuel consumption first a discrete choice model of automobile demand and a continuous model of vehicle utilization are estimated using micro data from the consumer expenditure survey for 1984 1990 next the demand side model is combined with a model of oligopoly and product differentiation on the supply side with these elements in place the effects of the cafe regulation are assessed through simulations and compared to the effects of alternative policy instruments such as an increase in gasoline tax

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

reputation and equilibrium characterization in repeated games with conflicting interests a two person game is of conflicting interests if the strategy to which player one would most like to commit herself holds player two down to his minimax payoff suppose there is a positive prior probability that player one is a commitme nt type who will always play this strategy then player one will get a t least her commitment payoff in any nash equilibrium of the repeated game if her discount factor approaches one this result is robust against further perturbations of the informational structure and in striking contrast to the message of the folk theorem for games with incomplete information copyright 1993 by the econometric society

oil price shocks and u s economic activity abstract our understanding of the sources of oil price fluctuations and their effects on the u s economy has undergone important transformations in the last decades first several studies have demonstrated the importance of identifying the causes of oil price fluctuations whether they are driven by demand or supply shocks instead of assuming that oil price changes are exogenous to the evolution of the world s economic activity second new methodologies have allowed researchers to re evaluate the functional form of the relationship between oil prices and u s gdp its components and job flows third significant advances have been made in understanding the relationship between oil price uncertainty news economic policy uncertainty and aggregate economic activity finally investigations into the time varying nature of oil price macroeconomy relationship have provided important insights into the reasons why unexpected increases in oil prices appear to shock less now than in the 1970s this paper reviews the studies that have contributed to these different aspects of the literature

how sensitive are consumer expenditures to retail energy prices abstract there is growing evidence that the primary effect of energy price shocks on the u s economy involves a reduction in consumer spending we quantify the direct effect on real consumption of unanticipated changes in discretionary income shifts in precautionary savings and changes in the operating cost of energy using durables the possibility of asymmetries in the response of real consumption to energy price shocks is also considered we demonstrate that linear models are consistent with the symmetric behavior of real consumption in 1979 when energy prices increased sharply and in 1986 when they fell sharply it is shown that historically energy price shocks have been an important factor in explaining u s real consumption growth but by no means the dominant factor

merging reputation and repeated games with incomplete information we relate and unify several results that appeared in the following domains merging of probabilities perturbed games and reputation phenomena and repeated games with incomplete information journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d83

greenhouse gas emissions and subjective well being an analysis of swedish households abstract in the contemporary discussion on society s transformation towards long term climate targets it is often implicitly assumed that behavioral changes unlike technological changes would lead to reductions in human well being however this assumption has been questioned by researchers who instead argue that people may live better lives by consuming less and reduce their environmental impact in the process in this study we explore the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and subjective well being using a sample of 1000 swedish respondents our results show that there is no strong link between an individual s emissions and subjective wellbeing we also analyze the relationship between specific emission intensive activities and subjective well being and find that none of the activities examined correlates with subjective well being finally we explore a hypothesis put forward in the literature suggesting that a poor work life balance long commuting distances and materialistic values may decrease individuals subjective well being and increase greenhouse gas emissions our results indicate that materialistic values do correlate with lower levels of well being and to some extent also with higher greenhouse gas emissions

common cycles and common trends in the stock and oil markets evidence from more than 150 years of data abstract this paper investigates the role of permanent and transitory shocks within the framework of common cycles and common trends in explaining stock and oil prices we perform a multivariate variance decomposition analysis of monthly data on the west texas intermediate wti oil price and the s p 500 the dataset used in the study spans a long period of 150 years and therefore contains a rich history to examine both the short and long run comovement properties of oil and stock prices given that the oil and stock markets might comove both in the short and long run it is of interest to see the relative impacts of transitory and permanent shocks on both variables we find that log oil price and log s p 500 share a common stochastic trend for our full sample of september 1859 to july 2015 but a common cycle only exists during the post ww ii period full and post ww ii samples have quite different common feature estimates in terms of the impact of permanent and transitory shocks as measured by the impulse responses and forecast error variance decompositions we also find that in the short run oil is driven mostly by cycles transitory shocks and stock market is mostly driven by permanent shocks but permanent shocks dominate in the long run

collusion with persistent cost shocks we consider a dynamic bertrand game in which prices are publicly observed and each firm receives a privately observed cost shock in each period although cost shocks are independent across firms within a firm costs follow a first order markov process we analyze the set of collusive equilibria available to firms emphasizing the best collusive scheme for the firms at the start of the game in general there is a trade off between productive efficiency whereby the low cost firm serves the market in a given period and high prices we show that when costs are perfectly correlated over time within a firm if the distribution of costs is log concave and firms are sufficiently patient then the optimal collusive scheme entails price rigidity firms set the same price and share the market equally regardless of their respective costs when serial correlation of costs is imperfect partial productive efficiency is optimal for the case of two cost types first best collusion is possible if the firms are patient relative to the persistence of cost shocks but not otherwise we present numerical examples of first best collusive schemes

less is more the influence of aspirations and priming on well being abstract if resource consumption is to be reduced through economic de growth individuals in industrialized countries may have to accept a reduction in their consumption levels in democratic societies implementing this process requires the consent of a majority of the population however as long as people have high reference levels of consumption lower consumption will induce feelings of loss and hence evoke resistance this paper summarizes recent experimental evidence on some of the factors that determine the utility costs involved in decreasing consumption the results suggest that the acceptance of economic de growth would be facilitated if people s material aspirations were moderated and the extent to which material achievements are emphasized in our daily environment were reduced an analysis of the financial and economic crisis that developed during 2008 suggests that it will not contribute to either of these points rather by increasing the public s focus on the economic sphere even beyond pre crisis levels it may lead to a further decrease in the acceptance of de growth policies in the population

forecasting the real prices of crude oil using forecast combinations over time varying parameter models abstract in this paper we forecast real prices of crude oil using real time forecast combinations over time varying parameter tvp models with single predictor we reveal the significant predictability at all horizons up to 24 months the mean squared predictive error reduction over the benchmark of no change forecast is as high as 17 and the directional accuracy as high as 0 645 a combination with tvp models is found to generate more accurate forecasts than the same combination with constant coefficient models because the forecast errors of individual tvp models are correlated at a lower degree we also evaluate the forecasting performance in the framework of density forecasting our results indicate that the benchmark model can be significantly outperformed by forecast combination at the horizons longer than 3 months

hidden regimes and the demand for carbon dioxide from motor gasoline abstract perhaps the most tactile source of anthropogenic carbon dioxide co2 emissions stem from vehicle use because consumers are well aware of their price and quantity decisions it is likely that consumer demand for co2 emissions from motor gasoline are quite responsive to the overall state of the economy using a structurally identified markov switching demand model i find that co2 emissions respond asymmetrically to changes in income and the price of gasoline in expansionary and contracting states of the economy the findings of this paper indicate that flexible policy instruments have the potential to mitigate undue burden on consumers and producers compared to their static counterparts

sequential bargaining with incomplete information this paper describes a simple two person two period bargaining game and solves it using the concept of perfect bayesian equilibrium in which the actions of each player convey information which is used by his opponent the paper examines the effects of changes in bargaining costs the size of the contract zone and the length of the bargaining process on such aspects of the solution as the probability of impasse and the likelihood of concessions the combination of information transfer and the lack of pre commitment embodied in perfectness yields many surprising results common perceptions about the effects of parameter changes on bargaining processes are suspect and should be checked in the particular game being discussed

economic de growth vs steady state economy in recent years the concept of economic de growth decroissance based on the literature of nicolas georgescu roegen e g 1 3 has found a revival in france italy spain and other countries in the popular as well as in the academic literature therein authors took on board georgescu roegens categorical rejection of a steady state economy sse as proposed by herman daly 4 they argue that economic degrowth is the only viable alternative goal to the growing economy this position is challenged in this article and it is concluded that the two concepts are in fact complements economic de growth is not a goal in itself but the rich north s path towards a globally equitable sse moreover the de growth literature can benefit from the strong economic historic roots of the sse and from daly s macroeconomic concepts while in return being able to give lessons about bottom up approaches this would be particularly important for the population issue where daly proposes limited birth licences unfortunately statements on demography are inconsistent and underdeveloped in the de growth literature further it is concluded that most criticisms of the sse are due to a too narrow and technocratic interpretation of the concept instead the sse should be defined as a quasi steady state resting in a dynamic equilibrium and as an unattainable goal which can and probably should be approximated

industry effects of oil price shocks a re examination abstract sectoral responses to oil price shocks help determine how these shocks are transmitted throughout the economy textbook treatments of oil price shocks often emphasize negative supply or cost effects on oil importing countries by contrast the seminal contribution of lee and ni 2002 has shown that almost all u s industries experience oil price shocks largely through a reduction in their respective demands only industries with very high oil intensities face a supply driven reduction in this paper we re examine this seminal finding using two additional decades of data further we apply updated empirical methods including structural factor augmented vector autoregressions that take into account how industries are linked among themselves and with the remainder of the macro economy our results confirm the original finding of lee and ni that demand effects of oil price shocks dominate in all but a handful of u s industries

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

bayesian repeated games and reputation the folk theorem characterizes the subgame perfect nash equilibrium payoffs of an undiscounted or discounted infinitely repeated game with fully informed patient players as the feasible individually rational payoffs of the one shot game to which extent does the result still hold when every player privately knows his own payoffs under appropriate assumptions private values and uniform punishments the nash equilibria of the bayesian infinitely repeated game without discounting are payoff equivalent to tractable completely revealing equilibria and can be achieved as interim cooperative solutions of the initial bayesian game this characterization does not apply to discounted games with sufficiently patient players in a class of public good games the set of nash equilibrium payoffs of the undiscounted game can be empty while limit perfect bayesian nash equilibrium payoffs of the discounted game as players become infinitely patient do exist these equilibria share some features with the ones of multi sided reputation models