forecasting crude oil price volatility and value at risk evidence from historical and recent data abstract this paper adopts the markov switching multifractal msm model and a battery of generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity garch type models to model and forecast oil price volatility extending previous work by wei et al 2010 and wang et al 2016 we evaluate the forecasting performance of all these models via a superior predictive ability spa test we go beyond previous research by i considering oil price volatility in the nineteenth century along with recent data ii applying different types of msm models and iii considering value at risk predictions besides our forecasting of volatility confirming its successful performance in other studies the new msm model comes out as the model that most often across forecasting horizons and subsamples cannot be outperformed by other models this superiority also applies to forecasting of value at risk

contagion as a wealth effect financial contagion is described as a wealth effect in a continuous time model with two risky assets and three types of traders noise traders trade randomly in one market long term investors provide liquidity using a linear rule based on fundamentals convergence traders with logarithmic utility trade optimally in both markets asset price dynamics are endogenously determined numerically as functions of endogenous wealth and exogenous noise when convergence traders lose money they liquidate positions in both markets this creates contagion in that returns become more volatile and more correlated contagion reduces benefits from portfolio diversification and raises issues for risk management during the f inancial panic associated with the default of the russian government in august 1998 and the subsequent collapse of the hedge fund long term capital management numerous hedge funds banks and securities firms tried simultaneously to reduce exposures to a variety of financial instruments such as russian bonds brazilian stocks u s mortgages spreads between on therun and off the run government securities and spreads between swaps and u s treasuries although the fundamental values of these positions would appear to have little correlation during this financial crisis the asset prices in these markets exhibited the following common empirical pattern 1 financial intermediaries suffered losses as prices moved against their positions 2 market depth and liquidity decreased simultaneously in several markets 3 the volatility of prices increased simultaneously in several markets and

food versus fuel an updated and expanded evidence abstract this paper replicates the study of zhang et al 2010 food versus fuel what do prices tell us energy policy 38 pp 445 451 we confirm the findings of the original paper that there was only a weak relationship between ethanol and food commodities in the period between march 1989 and july 2008 in addition we extend that study and examine the cointegration relationship between biofuels and related commodities for a considerably enlarged dataset 3 vs 1 market 26 vs 8 commodities analysis up till 2017 vs 2008 weekly vs monthly data frequency focusing on the biofuel markets of brazil the eu and the usa in the three separate periods before during and after the food crisis of 2007 and 2008 we show that studying the time variation of the relationships plays an essential role in their proper understanding our results help to clarify the wide extensive discussion about the role of biofuels prices in food shortages manifested particularly during the food crises in agreement with the original study we confirm that price series data do not support strong statements about biofuels uniformly serving as main leading source of high food prices and consequently the food shortages

reassessing the empirical relationship between the oil price and the dollar abstract this paper aims at reassessing the empirical relationship between the real price of oil and the u s dollar real effective exchange rate over the 1974 2015 period we find that changes in both variables are now linked by a negative relationship going from the dollar exchange rate to the real oil price however the same relationship is found positive when ending the sample in the mid 2000s in line with the previous literature to understand and investigate this evolution we rely on a nonlinear smooth transition regression model in which the oil price dollar nexus depends on the dynamics followed by the u s currency our results show that the relationship is negative most of the times but turns positive when the dollar hits very high values as in the early eighties

a time varying copula approach to oil and stock market dependence the case of transition economies abstract we employ the time varying copula approach to investigate the conditional dependence between the brent crude oil price and stock markets in the central and eastern european cee transition economies our results show evidence of a positive dependence between the oil and the stock markets of the six cee countries which is indicative of a contagion between those markets regardless of the changes in the oil price or the cee stock index moreover the dependence patterns in both the center and left tails of the return distributions change over time particularly during the heart of the financial crisis and are best described by the survival gumbel copulas the empirical evidence also suggests that the lower tail dependence is much stronger than that of the upper tail highlighting the importance of contagion during severe contractionary business cycles among the sample markets poland is shown to be particularly sensitive in this regard while hungary and slovenia are the least sensitive

universal basic income a viable policy alternative although the need for an efficient roma integration policy is growing in europe surprisingly little robust scientific evidence regarding potential policy costs and expected benefits of alternative policy options has supported the policy design and implementation so far the present study attempts to narrow this evidence gap and aims to shed light on long run economic budgetary and fiscal effects of selected education and employment policies for the inclusion of the marginalised roma in the eu we employ a general equilibrium approach that allows us to assess not only the direct impact of alternative roma integration policies but also to capture all induced feedback effects our simulation results suggest that although roma integration policies would be costly for the public budget in the medium to long run economic budgetary and fiscal benefits may significantly outweigh short to medium run roma integration costs depending on the integration policy scenario and the analysed country the full repayment of the integration policy investment positive net present value may be achieved after 7 to 9 years in terms of the gdp employment and earnings the universal basic income scenario may have the highest potential impacts particularly in the medium to long run

measuring contagion between energy market and stock market during financial crisis a copula approach abstract in this paper we apply time varying copulas to investigate whether a contagion effect existed between energy and stock markets during the recent financial crisis using the wti oil spot price the s p500 index the shanghai stock market composite index and the shenzhen stock market component index returns evidence was found for a significantly increasing dependence between crude oil and stock markets after the failure of lehman brothers thus supporting the existence of contagion in the sense of forbes and rigobon s 2002 definition moreover increased tail dependence and symmetry characterize all the paired markets this indicates that significant increases in tail dependence are an actual dimension of the contagion phenomenon and that crude oil and stock prices are linked to the same degree regardless of whether markets are booming or crashing during the sample period finally the contagion effect is found to be much weaker for china than the us the empirical results have potentially important implications for risk management

transactions in the european carbon market a bubble of compliance in a whirlpool of speculation the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets is supposed to help regulated installations to cover their co2 emissions by trading in allowances in practice the eu ets is mainly a financial market used for hedging and speculation this financial feature is regarded as a solution hedging and liquidity to a problem the price risk and volatility imposed on installations which the market has actually created itself this paper provides an estimation of the real underpinning of the scheme i e the needs of installations for allowances transfers to achieve compliance in the two first exchange periods this estimation which was singularly lacking in the literature shows that compliance transactions become more and more marginal as market activity grows and that they are drowned in a whirlpool of speculation this challenges the role of the carbon price whose financial and self referential evaluation can obviously not reveal installations marginal abatement costs the condition of cost effectiveness expected from carbon trading

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

the cost of poverty alleviation transfer programs a comparative analysis of three programs in latin america summary a common criticism of antipoverty programs is that the high share of administrative nontransfer costs substantially reduces their effectiveness yet there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical evidence on program costs improved information and a better understanding of the costs of such programs are crucial for effective policymaking this study proposes and implements a replicable methodology for a comparative cost analysis of three similar poverty alleviation programs in latin america and assesses their cost efficiency the findings underscore that any credible assessment of cost efficiency requires a detailed analysis of program cost structures that goes well beyond simply providing aggregate cost information

an expository note on individual risk without aggregate uncertainty abstract in economies where agents bear some risk the analysis would often be facilitated by the assumption that the risks are i i d and disappear in the aggregate a formal appeal to the law of large numbers requires the consideration of a sequence of finite economies in an economy with a continuum of agents there are countable families of sets for which it is impossible for a law of large numbers to be valid with countably many agents and a finitely additive measure independence is compatible with the law of large numbers

a general equilibrium model of portfolio insurance this article examines the effects of portfolio insurance on market and asset price dynamics in a general equilibrium continuous time model portfolio insurers are modeled as expected utility maximizing agents martingale methods are employed in solving the individual agents dynamic consumption portfolio problems comparisons are made between the optimal consumption processes optimally invested wealth and portfolio strategies of the portfolio insurers and normal agents at a general equilibrium level comparisons across economies reveal that the market volatility and risk premium are decreased and the asset and market price levels increased by the presence of portfolio insurance article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

volatility spillovers between oil prices and stock sector returns implications for portfolio management abstract in this article we take a recent generalized var garch approach to examine the extent of volatility transmission between oil and stock markets in europe and the united states at the sector level the empirical model is advantageous in that it typically allows simultaneous shock transmission in the conditional returns and volatilities insofar as volatility transmission across oil and stock sector markets is a crucial element for portfolio designs and risk management we also analyze the optimal weights and hedge ratios for oil stock portfolio holdings with respect to the results our findings point to the existence of significant volatility spillover between oil and sector stock returns however the spillover is usually unidirectional from oil markets to stock markets in europe but bidirectional in the united states our back testing procedures finally suggest that taking the cross market volatility spillovers estimated from the var garch models often leads to diversification benefits and hedging effectiveness better than those of commonly used multivariate volatility models such as the ccc garch of bollerslev 1990 the diagonal bekk garch of engle and kroner 1995 and the dcc garch of engle 2002

extreme risk spillovers between crude oil and stock markets abstract this paper investigates the spillovers of extreme risks between crude oil and stock markets using daily data of the s p 500 stock index and west texas intermediate wti crude oil futures returns based on the method of granger causality in risk value at risk var is employed to measure market risk and a class of kernel based tests is used to detect negative and positive risk spillover effects empirical results reveal that there are significant risk spillovers between the two markets extreme movements past or current in one market may have a significant predictive power for those in the other market prior to the recent financial crisis there are positive risk spillovers from stock market to crude oil market and negative spillovers from crude oil market to stock market after the financial crisis bidirectional positive risk spillovers are strengthened markedly the risk spillovers may occur instantaneously and or with a long time delay both positive and negative risk spillover effects exhibit asymmetric correlations

contagion of self fulfilling financial crises due to diversification of investment portfolios abstract we look at two countries that have independent fundamentals but share the same group of investors each country might face a self fulfilling crisis agents withdrawing their investments fearing that others will a crisis in one country reduces agents wealth this makes them more averse to the strategic risk associated with the unknown behavior of other agents in the second country increasing their incentive to withdraw their investments consequently the probability of a crisis there increases this generates a positive correlation between the returns in the two countries since diversification affects returns in our model its welfare implications are non trivial

higher order expectations in asset pricing we examine formally keynes idea that higher order beliefs can drive a wedge between an asset price and its fundamental value based on expected future payoffs we call this the higher order wedge which depends on the difference between higher and first order expectations of future payoffs we analyze the determinants of this wedge and its impact on the equilibrium price in the context of a dynamic noisy rational expectations model we show that the wedge reduces asset price volatility and disconnects the price from the present value of future payoffs the impact of the higher order wedge on the equilibrium price can be quantitatively large

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

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

can information heterogeneity explain the exchange rate determination puzzle empirical evidence shows that most exchange rate volatility at short to medium horizons is related to order flow and not to macroeconomic variables we introduce symmetric information dispersion about future macroeconomic fundamentals in a dynamic rational expectations model in order to explain these stylized facts consistent with the evidence the model implies that a observed fundamentals account for little of exchange rate volatility in the short to medium run b over long horizons the exchange rate is closely related to observed fundamentals c exchange rate changes are a weak predictor of future fundamentals and d the exchange rate is closely related to order flow

on the links between stock and commodity markets volatility this paper investigates the links between price returns for 25 commodities and stocks over the period from january 2001 to november 2011 by paying a particular attention to energy raw materials relying on the dynamic conditional correlation dcc garch methodology we show that the correlations between commodity and stock markets evolve through time and are highly volatile particularly since the 2007 2008 financial crisis the latter has played a key role emphasizing the links between commodity and stock markets and underlining the financialization of commodity markets at the idiosyncratic level a speculation phenomenon is highlighted for oil coffee and cocoa while the safe haven role of gold is evidenced

have food and financial markets integrated this article analyses comovements and discusses possibly greater market integration between aggregate food commodity and stock prices in the period 1990 to 2012 return correlations price return distributions cointegration and granger causalities are tested in subsamples on monthly fao food price index and msci world stock market index empirical results suggest that while there is only weak indication of greater comovements concurrent with structural changes such as changed agricultural policies new demand due to growth in emerging markets and energy mandates and the financialization of food markets since the early 2000s they did start to increase substantially in particular during the financial stress of the lehman crisis and the great recession while structural changes may have amplified price linkages across markets results do not suggest that they are the key factors for greater price comovements instead the effects of the late 2000s recession as a time of great economic weakness and uncertai

on the dynamic dependence between equity markets commodity futures and economic uncertainty indexes this paper provides a thorough analysis on multiscale dependence schemes between equity markets commodity futures and uncertainty indexes based on decomposed return series we provide an exhausti

economic response to a guaranteed annual income experience from canada and the united states this article reviews research from the five income maintenance experiments in canada and the united states after sketching the historical and political context of the experiments we compare their designs and discuss some important analytic difficulties our primary focus is the work incentive issue both nonstructural estimates of the experimental effects and elasticity estimates of structural labor supply functions we provide initial estimates of nonstructural and structural models for the canadian experiment we discuss more briefly some non work response findings associated with a guaranteed annual income and offer some personal comments on social experimentation and the policy process

double question survey measures for the analysis of financial bubbles and crashes this article proposes a new double question survey whereby an individual is presented with two sets of questions one on beliefs about current asset values and another on price expectations a theo

wti crude oil futures in portfolio diversification the time to maturity effect the aim of the paper is to analyze the diversification effect brought by crude oil futures contracts the most liquid commodity futures into a portfolio of stocks the studies that have documented the very low and essentially negative correlations between commodities and equities typically rely on normally distributed returns which is not the case for crude oil futures and stocks indexes moreover the particular time to maturity chosen for the future contract used as an investment vehicle is an important matter that needs to be addressed in presence of forward curves switching between backwardation and contango shapes our goal in this paper is twofold a we introduce copula functions to have a better representation of the dependence structure of oil futures with equity indexes b using this copula representation we are able to analyze in a precise manner the maturity effect in the choice of crude oil future contract with respect to its diversification benefits our finding is that in the case of distant maturities futures e g 18 months the negative correlation effect is more pronounced whether stock prices increase or decrease this property has the merit to avoid the hurdles of a frequent roll over while being quite desirable in the current trendless equity markets empirical evidence is exhibited on a database comprising the nymex wti crude oil futures and s p 500 index over a 15 year time period

wavelet dynamics for oil stock world interactions abstract a previous research ignores the distinction between short term and long term and by decomposing financial variables world general and stock market indexes and the macroeconomic variable oil prices at various time scales we study the relationship among series on a daily scale by scale basis continuous time wavelets help to circumvent the problems associated to basic linear regressions and given that stock oil relationships are usually described as complicated we extend previous findings by providing more generalized and convincing results in analyzing contagion and interdependence issues as well as lead and lag effects for both world general and sector stock levels between december 1992 and october 2012 the relationship between oil prices and sector stock returns is ambiguous because results seem to show that there are both phase and anti phase relationships where mostly it is oil that is the lagging variable independently of the sector under analysis there is higher coherence among series for higher scales thus supporting the interdependence hypothesis showing that long run market dynamics are more uncertain empirical results indicate a bidirectional relationship between both series for large time horizons which can be associated to fundamentalist traders especially fund managers and institutional investors and which depend on the historical period under analysis

co movement of major energy agricultural and food commodity price returns a time series assessment abstract using monthly data between 1970 and 2013 we provide a comprehensive analysis of the extent of co movement measured by correlation coefficients among the nominal price returns of 11 major energy agricultural and food commodities we study the degree and the time evolution of unconditional and conditional correlations using a uniform spacings estimation and testing approach multivariate dynamic conditional correlation models and a rolling regression procedure we find that 1 the price returns of energy and agricultural commodities are highly correlated 2 the overall level of co movement among commodities increased in recent years especially between energy and agricultural commodities and in particular in the cases of maize and soybean oil which are important inputs in the production of biofuels and 3 the stock market volatility is positively associated with the co movement of price returns across markets especially after 2007

speculation and the term structure of interest rates we develop and estimate a tractable equilibrium term structure model populated with rational but heterogeneously informed traders that take on speculative positions to exploit what they perceive to be inaccurate market expectations about future bond prices the speculative motive is an important driver of trading volume yield dynamics due to speculation are 1 statistically distinct from classical term structure components due to risk premiums and expectations about future short rates and are orthogonal to public information available to traders in real time and 2 quantitatively important accounting for a substantial fraction of the variation of long maturity u s bond yields received may 12 2014 editorial decision may 10 2016 by editor pietro veronesi

convergence trading with wealth effects an amplification mechanism in financial markets abstract i study convergence traders with logarithmic utility in a continuous time equilibrium model in general convergence traders reduce asset price volatility and provide liquidity by taking risky positions against noise trading however when an unfavorable shock causes them to suffer capital losses thus eroding their risk bearing capacity they liquidate their positions thereby amplifying the original shock in extreme circumstances this wealth effect causes convergence traders to be destabilizing in that they trade in exactly the same direction as noise traders this situation is consistent with the near collapse of long term capital management in 1998

volatility behavior of oil industrial commodity and stock markets in a regime switching environment abstract this study supplements previous regime switching studies on wti crude oil and finds two possible volatility regimes for the strategic commodity prices of brent oil wti oil copper gold and silver and the s p 500 index but with varying high to low volatility ratios the dynamic conditional correlations dccs indicate increasing correlations among all the commodities since the 2003 iraq war but decreasing correlations with the s p 500 index the commodities also show different volatility persistence responses to financial and geopolitical crises while the s p 500 index responds to both financial and geopolitical crises implications are discussed

the directional volatility connectedness between crude oil and equity markets new evidence from implied volatility indexes in this paper we use a set of newly introduced implied volatility indexes to investigate the directional connectedness between oil and equities in eleven major stock exchanges around the globe from 2008 to 2015 the inference on the oil equity implied volatility relationships depends on diebold and yilmaz 2012 2014 2015 who proposed a set of directional measures that enable the dynamic and directional characterization of the relationships among financial variables we find uniform results across the sample countries indicating that the connectedness between oil and equity is established by the bi directional information spillovers between the two markets however we find that the bulk of association is largely dominated by the transmissions from the oil market to equity markets and not the other way around the pattern of transmissions is varying over the sample period however most of the linkages between oil and equities are established from the mid of 2009 to the mid of 2012 which is a period that witnessed the start of global recovery

do dropouts drop out too soon wealth health and happiness from compulsory schooling abstract this paper uses compulsory schooling laws to evaluate high school dropout decisions the main empirical result is that lifetime wealth increases by about 15 with an extra year of compulsory schooling students compelled to stay in school are also less likely to report being in poor health unemployed and unhappy the main conclusion is that high school aversion alone is unlikely to explain why dropouts forgo substantial gains to lifetime wealth the results are more consistent with the possibility that adolescents ignore or heavily discount future consequences when deciding to drop out of school if teenagers are myopic making school compulsory or offering incentives to stay in school may help improve lifetime outcomes

multiple equilibria in a simple asset pricing model multiple stationary equilibria are often encountered in standard asset pricing models when one assumes negative exponential utility with gaussian uncertainty this paper demonstrates that there are exactly two stationary equilibria which are due solely to the presence of nonlinearities

asset prices and trading volume in a beauty contest speculators buy an asset hoping to sell it later to investors with higher private valuations if agents are uncertain about the distribution of private valuations and about the beliefs of others about this distribution a beauty contest with an infinite hierarchy of beliefs arises under harsanyi s assumption of a common prior the infinite beliefs hierarchy is readily solved using bayes law this paper shows that common knowledge of the beliefs formation rule mapping the private valuation of each agent into his first order belief also simplifies the beliefs hierarchy while allowing for disagreement among agents we analyse the resulting speculation in a stylized asset market several statistics computed only from readily observable quote return and volume data are evaluated in terms of their power to discriminate between genuine disagreement and the harsanyian case only statistics that relate volume and volatility or volume and changes in best offers have the necessary discriminatory power

are oil shocks inflationary asymmetric and nonlinear specifications versus changes in regime this paper identifies a structural break in core u s inflation phillips curves such that oil prices contributed substantially before 1981 but since that time pass through has been negligible this characterization is robust to a variety of re specifications and fits the data better than asymmetric and nonlinear oil price alternatives evidence does not support the hypotheses that declining energy intensity or deregulation of energy producing and consuming industries played an important role monetary policy did not itself become less accommodative of oil shocks but may have helped create a regime where inflation is less sensitive to price shocks more generally

rational expectations in stationary linear models linear time series models have come to dominate the macroeconomic literature on rational expectations and equilibrium business cycle theory but the explicit solution of such models has generally required strong restrictions upon the exogenous process of stochastic shocks e g temporal independence as well as upon the values of various demand and supply elasticities this paper exhibits a solution technique the method of z transforms which does not require one to impose such restrictions the value of this method is illustrated by applying it to completely characterize the symmetric stationary rational expectations equilibria of a naive linear model of land speculation this approach also permits systematic study of the informationally asymmetric equilibria of the model this paper develops a method for analyzing rational expectations re equilibria in linear economic models the methods i shall discuss usually enable one to determine whether or not a given model has a re equilibrium and if one exists to exhibit an explicit expression for the stochastic process of equilibrium prices the techniques apply to linear models driven by stationary processes of exogenous random shocks

commodity and equity markets some stylized facts from a copula approach abstract in this paper we propose to identify the dependence structure that exists between returns on equity and commodity futures and its development over the past 20 years the key point is that we do not impose any dependence structure but let the data select it to do so we model the dependence between commodity metal agriculture and energy and stock markets using a flexible approach that allows us to investigate whether the co movement is i symmetrical and frequent ii a symmetrical and mostly present during extreme events and iii asymmetrical and mostly present during extreme events we also allow for this dependence to be time varying from january 1990 to february 2012 our analysis uncovers three major stylised facts first we find that the dependence between commodity and stock markets is time varying symmetrical and occurs most of the time as opposed to mostly during extreme events second not allowing for time varying parameters in the dependence distribution generates a bias towards an evidence of tail dependence similarly considering only tail dependence may lead to false evidence of asymmetry third a growing co movement between industrial metals and equity markets is identified as early as 2003 this co movement spreads to all commodity classes and becomes unambiguously stronger with the global financial crisis after fall 2008

exchange rate manipulation and constructive ambiguity i consider dynamic models in which investors are heterogeneously informed about both foreign exchange interventions and exchange rate fundamentals and show that transparency sometimes exacerbates misalignment between the exchange rate and fundamentals although transparency reveals information about fundamentals it also increases the precision of the exchange rate as a signal of those fundamentals that remain unknown the signal precision effect of transparency if a central bank announcement reveals little information about fundamentals then this effect dominates and transparency magnifies misalignment one implication is that ambiguity can increase the effectiveness of intervention to support a declining currency during times of crisis

recent hikes in oil equity market correlations transitory or permanent this paper empirically examines the long run behavior of eight oil equity correlations based on the adcc asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation model and a novel decomposing approach we select equity price indexes from three developed countries the us the uk and germany and five brics member countries brazil russia india china and south africa and consider ten economic financial events for investigation seven correlations exhibit a positively sloped trend and one exhibits a horizontal trend all of these trends have undergone one or two structural breaks which moved the corresponding correlations to their highest ever evolutionary paths these structural breaks are associated with one or more of the ten episodes considered and a common event impacting all eight of the correlation trends is detected to be the 2008 adverse oil shock the broken trends explain why the correlations were low in the early years and high in the recent years our findings indicate that recent hikes in the oil equity correlations are a long run phenomenon

rational contagion and the globalization of securities markets this paper argues that globalization may promote contagion by weakening incentives for gathering costly information and by strengthening incentives for imitating arbitrary market portfolios in the presence of short selling constraints the gain of gathering information at a fixed cost may diminish as markets grow moreover if a portfolio manager s marginal cost for yielding below market returns exceeds the marginal gain for above market returns there is a range of optimal portfolios in which all investors imitate arbitrary market portfolios and this range widens as the market grows numerical simulations suggest that these frictions can have significant implications for capital flows in emerging markets

forecasting the forecasts of others implications for asset pricing we develop a dynamic asset pricing model with heterogeneously informed agents unlike previous research we focus on the general case where differential information leads to the problem of forecasting the forecasts of others and to non trivial dynamics of higher order expectations in particular we prove that the model does not admit a finite number of state variables using numerical analysis we compare equilibria characterized by identical fundamentals but different information structure we demonstrate that the distribution of information has substantial impact on equilibrium prices and returns in particular we show that asymmetric information can generate momentum in returns and high trading volume

the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families lleras muney we estimate the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children s longevity educational attainment nutritional status and income in adulthood to do so we collected individual level administrative records of applicants to the mothers pension program the first government sponsored welfare program in the united states 1911 1935 and matched them to census wwii and death records male children of accepted applicants lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers they also obtained onethird more years of schooling were less likely to be underweight and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers jel i12 i14 i18 i32 i38 j16 n32

on the dynamic links between commodities and islamic equity abstract this paper investigates whether commodities offer potential diversification benefits for islamic equity index investors in light of possible financialization of commodity markets using mgarch dcc and wavelet coherence analyses our findings reveal that correlations between commodity markets and the dow jones islamic market world index are time varying and highly volatile throughout the january 1999 april 2015 period a substantial and persistent increase was observed in the return correlations between commodities and islamic equity at the onset of the 2008 financial crisis however trends in the recent two years suggest that this association is heading towards its pre crisis levels offering again diversification benefits for islamic equity holders these benefits vary across different commodities in various time scales overall gold natural gas soft commodities grains and livestock are better portfolio diversifiers than oil and other metals relative to medium to long term investors short term investors less than 32 days horizon gained better diversification benefits in most commodities during bullish bearish and market recovery periods these findings have implications for investors who are heterogeneous in risk tolerance and time preference as well as for policymakers who are concerned with market stability

dynamic conditional correlations in political science time varying relationships and volatility are two methodological challenges that are particular to the field of time series in the case of the former more comprehensive understanding can emerge when we ask under what circumstances relationships may change the impact of context such as the political environment the state of the economy the international situation etc is often missing in dynamic analyses that estimate time invariant parameters in addition time varying volatility presents a number of challenges including threats to inference if left unchecked among time varying parameter models the dynamic conditional correlation dcc model is a creative and useful approach that deals effectively with over time variation in both the mean and variance of time series the dcc model allows us to study the evolution of relationships over time in a multivariate setting by relaxing model assumptions and offers researchers a chance to reinvigorate understandings that are tested using time series data we demonstrate the method s potential in the first example by showing how the importance of subjective evaluations of the economy are not constant but vary considerably over time as predictors of presidential approval a second example using international dyadic time series data shows that the story of movement and comovement is incomplete without an understanding of the dynamics of their variance as well as their means

dynamic speculation and hedging in commodity futures markets with a stochastic convenience yield the main objective of this paper is to address in an a continuous time framework the issue of using storable commodity futures as vehicles for hedging purposes when in particular the convenience yield as well as the market prices of risk evolve randomly over time following the martingale route and by operating a suitable constant relative risk aversion utility function crra specific change of numeraire we solve the investor s dynamic optimization program to obtain quasi analytical solutions for optimal demands which can be expressed in terms of two discount bonds traded and synthetic contrary to the existing literature we explicitly derive the individual optimal proportions invested in the spot commodity in a discount bond and in the futures contracts which can be computed in a simple recursive way we suggest various decompositions allowing an investor to assess the sensitivity of the optimal demands to the state variables and to specify the role played by each risky asset empirical evidence shows that the convenience yield has a strong impact on the speculation and hedging positions and the interaction among time varying risk premia determines the magnitude and the sign of these positions

dynamic risk spillovers between gold oil prices and conventional sustainability and islamic equity aggregates and sectors with portfolio implications this paper investigates the time varying equicorrelations and risk spillovers between crude oil gold and the dow jones conventional sustainability and islamic stock index aggregates and 10 associated disaggregated islamic sector stock indexes basic materials consumer services consumer goods energy financials health care technology industrials telecommunications and utilities using the multivariate deco fiaparch model and the spillover index of diebold and yilmaz 2012 we also conduct a risk management analysis at the sector level for commodity islamic stock sector index portfolios using different risk exposure measures for comparison purposes we add the aggregate conventional dow jones global index and the dow jones sustainability world index the results show evidence of time varying risk spillovers between these markets moreover there are increases in the correlations among the markets in the aftermath of the 2008 2009 gfc further the oil gold energy financial technology and telecommunications sectors are net receivers of risk spillovers while the sustainability and conventional aggregate djim indexes as well as the remaining islamic stock sectors are net contributors of risk spillovers finally we provide evidence that gold offers better portfolio diversification benefits and downside risk reductions than oil

long term social economic and fiscal effects of immigration into the eu the role of the integration policy the issues of the forced migration and the integration of refugees in the society and labour markets are high on the policy agenda of the eu apart from humanitarian aspects a sustainable integration of refugees is important also for social economic budgetary and others reasons indeed the potential consequences of the asylum seeker acceptance are being often discussed though little scientific evidence has been provided for the policy debate so far the present study attempts to shed light on the long run social economic and budgetary effects of forced immigration into the eu by applying a macroeconomic model of the european commission and performing scenario analysis of alternative refugee integration scenarios our simulation results suggest that although refugee integration e g by providing language and professional training is costly for the public budget in the medium to long run the social economic and fiscal benefits may significantly outweigh the short run refugee integration costs in addition the integration policy has the potential to play an important role in improving the social inclusion filling vacancies improving the ratio of workers to economically inactive addressing europe s alarming demographic challenges and boosting jobs and growth in the eu

a test of dual labor market theory despite substantial differences in their views of the appropriate policy response to the existence of poverty neither the proponents of dual market theory nor its critics have proposed potentially conclusive tests of the dual market hypothesis this paper presents a test of the two central propositions of dual market theory 1 the existence of two distinct labor markets with different wage setting mechanisms and 2 the existence of barriers to mobility between the labor markets we find considerable support for both hypothesis estimation of a switching model of wage determination with unknown regimes yields two distinct wage equations the one which most workers are associated with closely resembles the standard human capital regression with significant returns to education and experience the other equation is flat with no returns to human capital these two equations resemble the predictions of dual market theory for the primary and secondary markets respectively further we present evidence that at least some non white workers are involuntarily confined to the secondary market this crowding of minority workers into the low wage labor market accounts for a substantial portion of white non white wage differences we interpret these results as providing empirical support for the dual market hypothesis and for recent theoretical work on efficiency wagemodels in addition combining the efficiency wage argument with the observation that much of the white non white wage difference is explained by the exclusion of non whites from the primary sector suggests an explanation for the persistance of wage differences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

equilibrium analysis of portfolio insurance a martingale approach is used to characterize general equilibrium in the presence of portfolio insurance insurers sell to noninsurers in bad states and general equilibrium requires that the risk premium rises to induce noninsurers to increase their holdings we show that portfolio insurance increases price volatility causes mean reversion in asset returns raises the sharpe ratio and volatility in bad states and causes volatility to be correlated with volume we also explain why out of the money sp that is the demand for an absolute level of price protection is equivalent to a demand for put options 1 we show that a similar argument can be used in a

dependence structure and risk measure understanding the relationships among multivariate assets would help one greatly about how best to position one s investments and enhance one s financial risk protection we present a new method to model parametrically the dependence structure of stock index returns through a continuous distribution function which links an n dimensional density to its one dimensional margins the resulting multivariate model could be used in a wide range of financial applications focusing on risk management we show that a misspecification of the dependence structure introduces on average an error in value at risk estimates

a model of competitive stock trading volume a model of competitive stock trading is developed in which investors are heterogeneous in their information and private investment opportunities and rationally trade for both informational and noninformational motives i examine the link between the nature of heterogeneity among investors and the behavior of trading volume and its relation to price dynamics it is found that volume is positively correlated with absolute changes in prices and dividends i show that informational trading and noninformational trading lead to different dynamic relations between trading volume and stock returns

differential information and dynamic behavior of stock trading volume this article develops a multiperiod rational expectations model of stock trading in which investors have differential information concerning the underlying value of the stock investors trade competitively in the stock market based on their private information and the information revealed by the market clearing prices as well as other public news we examine how trading volume is related to the information flow in the market and how investors trading reveals their private information article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

shadow wages and peasant family labour supply an econometric application to the peruvian sierra a striking feature of developing economies is the large proportion of the work force that is self employed lack of widespread labor market participation in the agricultural sector can pose a major obstacle to the empirical implementation of economic models of the peasant household whether because wage data are simply not available or because the assumptions required to make use of wage data stretch the bounds of credulity this paper develops a methodology for estimating a structural labor supply model for primarily self employed peasant households which holds under a general agricultural technology and set of labor market conditions the unique feature of the approach is that the opportunity cost of time or shadow wage of household workers is explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function and is subsequently used to identify a set of structural labor supply parameters recent household survey data from rural peru is employed to estimate and perform various diagnostic tests on the model the empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis that peasant households allocate their members time as if to maximize a family utility function and moreover demonstrate the tractability of the shadow wage methodology and its usefulness in estimating more elaborate time allocation models

the social cost of near rational investment abstract we show that the stock market may fail to aggregate information even if it appears to be efficient and that the resulting decrease in the information content of prices may drastically red

beauty contests and iterated expectations in asset markets in a financial market where traders are risk averse and short lived and prices are noisy asset prices today depend on the average expectation today of tomorrow s price thus iterating this relationship the date 1 price equals the date 1 average expectation of the date 2 average expectation of the date 3 price this will not in general equal the date 1 average expectation of the date 3 price we show how this failure of the law of iterated expectations for average belief can help understand the role of higher order beliefs in a fully rational asset pricing model and explain over reaction to noisy public information

finite bubbles with short sale constraints and asymmetric information abstract we present a finite period general equilibrium model of an exchange economy with asymmetric information we say that a rational expectations equilibrium exhibits a strong bubble if the price is higher than the dividend with probability one we show that necessary conditions for a strong bubble to occur are that 1 each agent must have private information in the period and state in which the bubble occurs 2 each agent must be short sale constrained at some period in the future with positive probability and 3 agents trades are not common knowledge we present examples of bubbles when the necessary conditions are satisfied journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d52 d82 d84 g12 g14

precious metals oil and the exchange rate contemporaneous spillovers abstractwe investigate the contemporaneous spillovers among precious metals crude oil and the us exchange rate we contend that conventional reduced form vector autoregressive var models based on lead lag relations do not fully capture the interactions among these series as these models ignore the contemporaneous effects using a structural var model we identify these contemporaneous spillovers which are shown to be strong and asymmetric we further show that not taking into consideration the contemporaneous interactions among these assets leads to inaccurate findings and inevitably to inaccurate interpretations of the causal relations among them

the emperor has no clothes limits to risk modelling abstract this paper considers the properties of risk measures primarily value at risk var from both internal and external regulatory points of view it is argued that since market data is endogenous to market behavior statistical analysis made in times of stability does not provide much guidance in times of crisis in an extensive survey across data classes and risk models the empirical properties of current risk forecasting models are found to be lacking in robustness while being excessively volatile for regulatory use the var measure may give misleading information about risk and in some cases may actually increase both idiosyncratic and systemic risk

time frequency contained co movement of crude oil and world food prices a wavelet based analysis abstract this paper evaluates the association between crude oil prices and world food price indices first within general space and time and then within the combined time frequency sphere monthly price data spanning from january 1990 to february 2016 were used for the analysis the johansen cointegration test conducted within the time domain confirmed the statistically significant cointegrated relationship between crude oil prices and the price indices of food and its sub categories such as dairy cereals vegetable oil and sugar however frequency information was not accounted for to incorporate both the time and frequency features of the data we used a wavelet method that has shown that the world food prices along with the prices of cereals vegetable oils and sugar co move with and are led by crude oil prices results that remain relevant from the short run policy perspective the outcome of toda yamamoto causality confirmed the spillover of crude oil price changes to the world food price index also in the long run the paper ends with the policy implications of these results

are benefits from oil stocks diversification gone new evidence from a dynamic copula and high frequency data abstract oil is perceived as a good diversification tool for stock markets to fully understand this potential we propose a new empirical methodology that combines generalized autoregressive score copula functions with high frequency data and allows us to capture and forecast the conditional time varying joint distribution of the oil stocks pair accurately our realized garch with time varying copula yields statistically better forecasts of the dependence and quantiles of the distribution relative to competing models employing a recently proposed conditional diversification benefits measure that considers higher order moments and nonlinear dependence from tail events we document decreasing benefits from diversification over the past ten years the diversification benefits implied by our empirical model are moreover strongly varied over time these findings have important implications for asset allocation as the benefits of including oil in stock portfolios may not be as large as perceived

robust permanent income and pricing i suppose there exists an extremely powerful and if i may so speak malignant being whose whole endeavours are directed toward deceiving me rene descartes meditations ii 1

interbank lending and systemic risk systemic risk refers to the propagation of a bank s economic distress to other economic agents linked to that bank through financial transactions banking authorities often prevent systemic risk through an implicit insurance of interbank claims or by reducing interbank transactions and centralizing banks liquidity management this paper investigates whether the flexability afforded by decentralized bank interactions can be preserved while protecting the central banks from the necessity of conducting undesired rescue operations it develops a model in which decentralized interbank leading is motivated by peer monitoring in this context the paper derives the optimal prudential rules and in particular looks at the impact of interbank monitoring on the solvency and liquidity ratios of borrowing and lending banks last it provides conditions which a too big to fail policy is or is not justified and studies the possibility of propagation of a bank s liquidity shock throughout the financial system copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

how equilibrium prices reveal information in a time series model with disparately informed competitive traders abstract accommodating asymmetric information in a dynamic asset pricing model is technically challenging due to the problems associated with higher order expectations that is rational investors are forced into a situation where they must forecast the forecasts of other agents in a dynamic setting this problem telescopes into the infinite future and the dimension of the relevant state space approaches infinity by using the frequency domain approach of whiteman linear rational expectations models a user s guide university of minnesota press minneapolis 1983 and kasa forecasting the forecasts of others in the frequency domain rev econ dynam 3 2000 726 756 this paper demonstrates how information structures previously believed to preserve asymmetric information in equilibrium converge to a symmetric information rational expectations equilibrium the revealing aspect of the price process lies in the invertibility of the observed state space which makes it possible for agents to infer the economically fundamental shocks and thus eliminating the need to forecast the forecasts of others

why do markets move together an investigation of u s japan stock return comovements this article explores the fundamental factors that affect cross country stock return correlations using transactions data from 1988 to 1992 we construct overnight and intraday returns for a portfolio of japanese stocks using their nyse traded american depository receipts adrs and a matched sample portfolio of u s stocks we find that u s macroeconomic announcements shocks to the yen dollar foreign exchange rate and treasury bill returns and industry effects have no measurable influence on u s and japanese return correlations however large shocks to broadbased market indices nikkei stock average and standard and poor s 500 stock index positively impact both the magnitude and persistence of the return correlations stock return cross country covariances play a key role in international finance changes in these covariances affect the volatility of portfolios and asset prices as these covariances increase one expects that a fewer domestic risks are internationally diversifiable so portfolio volatility increases b the risk premium on the world market portfolio increases 1 c the cost of capital increases for individual firms and d the domestic version of the capm becomes increasingly inadequate 2 despite the important economic consequences of changes in cross country covariances the determinants of the levels and dynamics of these covariances have been little studied from an academic

order flows and the exchange rate disconnect puzzle abstract the aim of this paper is to establish the link between the high frequency dynamics of spot exchange rates and developments in the macroeconomy to do so i first present a theoretical model of exchange rate determination that bridges the gap between existing microstructure and traditional models the model examines how dispersed microeconomic information known to individual agents outside the foreign exchange market is aggregated and transmitted to dealers via transaction flows i e order flow and how the information is then embedded in the spot exchange rate i then report empirical evidence that strongly supports the presence of the link between the macroeconomy order flow and high frequency exchange rate returns implied by the model in fact my empirical results indicate that between 20 and 30 of the variance in excess currency returns over one and two month horizons can be linked back to developments in the macroeconomy this level of explanatory power is an order of magnitude higher than that found in traditional models even the newly developed monetary models incorporating central banks reaction functions moreover it provides a straightforward solution to the exchange rate disconnect puzzle namely the high frequency behavior of spot exchange rates reflects the flow of new information reaching dealers concerning the slowly evolving state of the macroeconomy rather than the effects of shocks that drive rapidly changing macroeconomic conditions

optimal monetary policy with uncertain fundamentals and dispersed information this paper studies optimal monetary policy in a model where aggregate fluctuations are driven by the private sector s uncertainty about the economy s fundamentals information on aggregate productivity is dispersed across agents and there are two aggregate shocks a standard productivity shock and a noise shock affecting public beliefs about aggregate productivity neither the central bank nor individual agents can distinguish the two shocks when they are realized despite the lack of superior information monetary policy can affect the economy s relative response to the two shocks as time passes better information on past fundamentals becomes available the central bank can then adopt a backward looking policy rule based on more precise information about past shocks by announcing its response to future information the central bank can influence the expected real interest rate faced by forward looking consumers with different beliefs and thus affect the equilibrium allocation if the announced future response is sufficiently aggressive the central bank can completely eliminate the effect of noise shocks however this policy is typically suboptimal as it leads to an excessively compressed distribution of relative prices the optimal monetary policy balances the benefits of aggregate stabilization with the costs in terms of cross sectional efficiency copyright wiley blackwell

economic linkages across commodity futures hedging and trading implications we investigate cross market trading dynamics in futures contracts written on seemingly unrelated commodities that are consumed by a common industry on the tokyo commodity exchange we find such evidence in natural rubber nr palladium pa and gasoline ga futures markets the automobile industry is responsible for more than 50 of global demand for each of these commodities var estimation reveals short run cross market interaction between nr and ga and from nr to pa cross market influence exerted by pa is felt in longer dynamics with pa volatility volume affecting nr ga volume volatility our findings are robust to lag specification volatility measure and consistent with full bekk garch estimation results further analysis which benchmarks against silver futures market tocom index and topix transportation index confirms that our results are driven by a common industry exposure and not a commodity market factor a simple trading rule that incorporates short run ga and long run pa dynamics to predict nr return yields positive economic profit our study offers new insights into how commodity and equity markets relate at an industry level and implications for multi commodity hedging

diversifying away the risk of war and cross border political crisis this paper investigates the behavior of crude oil prices government bonds and stock market indices around outbreaks of severe international crises and wars using a constant mean return event study we show that these events are associated with positive and significant abnormal returns on oil and bonds which means that these two asset classes can potentially shelter shareholders from plummeting equity values during international crises a formal safe haven analysis confirms this insight such price movements may reflect a reallocation of funds across asset classes in response to the events as well as shifts in the demand for oil due to precautionary speculative and military motives we also calculate the weights for optimal portfolios which could provide insurance against conflict risk

non gaussian diversification when size matters abstract classical portfolio theory informs investors that they should have a large number of assets in their portfolios in order to diversify risk we show that the non gaussian features of stock return distribution may not allow for this risk protection in times of crisis moreover we demonstrate empirically that if investors are risk averse and consider higher order moments they have numerous incentives not to diversify their portfolios fully this is caused by the evolution of both large losses and asymmetry of returns when the numbers of assets in a portfolio change