the effects of oil price shocks on the economies of the gulf co operation council countries nonlinear analysis abstract this paper examines the effects of oil price shocks on the real gdp of the gulf cooperation council gcc countries the empirical method used is the nonlinear cointegrating autoregressive distributed lag nardl model of shin et al 2013 in which short run and long run nonlinearities are introduced via positive and negative partial sum decompositions of the explanatory variable s the results suggest evidence of asymmetries in all the cases we find significant positive oil price changes in all the cases with the expected positive sign implying that increases in oil price lead to increases in real gdp conversely negative oil price changes are significant for only kuwait and qatar with the expected positive sign suggesting that decreases in oil price lead to decreases in their real gdp further analysis implemented using panel data shows that positive oil prices changes increase real gdp and negative changes decrease real gdp overall the results suggest that positive oil price changes have a considerably larger impact on real gdp than negative changes

crude oil corn ethanol nexus a contextual approach this paper offers a holistic study on the complex relationships between crude oil corn and ethanol during a turbulent period between 2006 and end of 2011 through a holistic mapping of the current market situation and a contextual analytical design we show that there exists a strong relationship between crude oil and corn markets on one side and crude oil and ethanol on the other however the price relationship between corn and ethanol was revealed to be less straightforward and is driven by the us government fuel policy furthermore the study indicates that corn markets have became more prone to volatility due to ethanol production especially when the demand for corn is high and or the crude oil prices are high enough to create a competitive market for ethanol

measuring technical efficiency abstract the theoretical consideration of technical efficiency has existed since koopmans koopmans t c 1951 an analysis of production as an efficient combination of activities in koopmans t c ed activity analysis of production and allocation cowles commission for research in economics monograph no 13 wiley new york defined it as production possibilities for which it is not possible to increase any output without simultaneously increasing any input ceteris paribus the non parametric approach to efficiency calculation known as data envelopment analysis is not based on this definition but rather on the radial index of farrell farrell m j 1957 the measurement of productive efficiency journal of the royal statistic society ser a 120 253 281 even after farrell efficiency is achieved there may exist additional slack in individual inputs and or outputs implying that farrell s index does not necessarily measure koopmans inefficiency various measures have been proposed to solve this problem this paper discusses shortcomings of these alternative measures and introduces a new relative measure of technical efficiency using simulated data it is shown that the new measure outperforms existing measures in the majority of cases

asymmetric oil shocks and external balances of major oil exporting and importing countries this study investigates the effects of oil price shocks on three measures of oil exporters and oil importers external balances total trade balance oil trade balance and non oil trade balance we employ three second generation heterogeneous linear panel models and one recently developed non linear panel estimation technique that allows for cross sectional dependence with respect to 28 major oil exporting countries an increase in oil prices leads to an improved real oil trade balance although it is detrimental to non oil and total trade balances this finding might be due to the expenditure effect arising from increases in proceeds from oil exports a decrease in oil prices is found to be beneficial for both total and oil trade balances in these oil exporting countries forty major oil importers seem to be increasingly shielded from positive oil shocks over the 1970s and 1980s however they must worry about oil price declines a decline in oil prices has a negative impact on both total and real oil trade balances resulting from increased oil imports in emerging economies hence a decline in oil prices is beneficial to oil exporters due to the quantity effect outweighing the price effect while for oil importers a stable oil price is more desirable than a price decline these results are important to take into account if we are to gain a full understanding on the magnitude of the trade and macroeconomic effects of oil price changes and what the policy responses should be

oil price shocks and their short and long term effects on the chinese economy a considerable body of economic literature shows the adverse economic impacts of oil price shocks for the developed economies however there has been a lack of empirical study of this kind on china and other developing countries this paper attempts to fill this gap by answering how and to what extent oil price shocks impact china s economy emphasizing on the price transmission mechanisms to that end we develop a structural vector auto regressive model our results show that an oil price increase negatively affects output and investment but positively affects inflation rate and interest rate however with the differentiated price control policies for materials and intermediates on the one hand and final products on the other hand in china the impact on real economy represented by real output and real investment lasts much longer than that to price monetary variables our decomposition results also show that the short term impact namely output decrease induced by the cut of capacity utilization rate is greater in the first one to two years but the portion of the long term impact defined as the impact realized through an investment change increases steadily and exceeds that of short term impact at the end of the second year afterwards the long term impact dominates and maintains for quite some time

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

long run purchasing power parity with asymmetric adjustment 1 introduction despite its intuitive appeal there is inconclusive evidence supporting purchasing power parity ppp between countries with low inflation rates during the post bretton woods period for example enders 1988 taylor 1988 and macdonald 1993 use various forms of cointegration tests called stage three tests and find that real exchange rates exhibit large fluctuations with slow rates of decay toward a long run mean froot and rogoff s 1995 literature review presents a consensus estimate that deviations from long run ppp have a half life of about three years this is somewhat disappointing since stage three tests seem to be well suited to the task they require no assumptions concerning exogeneity and they imply a sensible dynamic relationship among price levels and the exchange rate the vast literature on ppp is indicative of the importance of the issue and the ambiguity of the findings it is well recognized that standard cointegration tests have low power to reject the null hypothesis of no cointegration this observation is especially relevant for ppp since any mean reversion in real rates is very gradual and the length of the post bretton woods period sample period is relatively short efforts to increase the power of unit root and stage three tests have had mixed success for example lothian and taylor 1996 and mark 1990 have tried to circumvent the low power of stage three tests by using long spans of time series data unfortunately the use of long time spans raises the possibility of structural changes occurring during the period being examined panel unit root tests are generally more supportive of ppp than are bilateral tests of real exchange rate behavior for example oh 1996 wei and parsley 1995 and wu 1996 have used panel data in order to enhance the power of standard unit root tests although these particular articles are supportive of ppp panel studies must deal with the thorny issues of cross sectional correlation and the choice of the nations to include in the panel papell 1997 finds that allowing for serial correlation substantially weakens the evidence in favor of long run ppp o connell 1998 applies generalized least squares to panel data to eliminate any contemporaneous correlation in the error structure and finds no evidence supporting ppp the second problem with the standard unit root and cointegration tests is that they implicitly assume symmetric adjustment however official intervention in the foreign exchange market means that nominal exchange rate adjustment may be asymmetric under a managed float for example one of the monetary authorities might be more willing to tolerate currency appreciation than depreciation similarly a currency band mitigates exchange rate movements until the level of the band is altered furthermore the slow adjustment of real exchange rates is often explained by the stickiness of national price levels for example in the well known dornbusch 1976 overshooting model prices and the exchange rate move in the same proportion as the money supply in the very long run however in the short run prices are sticky and monetary shocks cause ppp deviations since the exchange rate moves proportionately more than prices rhee and rich 1995 and madsen and yang 1998 provide empirical evidence corroborating the implications of the asymmetric price adjustment models the key point to note is that if prices are primarily sticky in the downward direction there is no reason to presuppose that real exchange rate adjustment is symmetric in spite of the evidence supportive of asymmetric exchange rate and price adjustments there are only a few nonlinear tests of ppp although they do not explicitly test for ppp michael nobay and peel 1997 and taylor and sarno 1998 estimate real exchange rates as smooth transition threshold adjustment processes enders and falk 1998 formally apply various nonlinear unit root tests to real exchange rates and find little evidence of ppp

technical efficiency shadow price and substitutability of chinese industrial so2 emissions a parametric approach abstract in china s transition process towards sustainable development fighting against the rising so2 emission has become a great and urgent challenge based on a parametric quadratic directional distance function this paper investigates the inefficiency level shadow price and substitution elasticity of chinese industrial so2 emission from 1998 to 2011 the results show a u shape for the technical inefficiency indicating an efficiency improvement before 2005 but it getting worse since then which is that the east area displays a declining trend while the west goes up and the middle follows the national pattern at the east middle west region level as of the shadow price and morishima elasticity both the national and regional levels hold an increasing trajectory the shadow price is continuously increased a lot during the whole period implying to control additional so2 emission become more costly the positive morishima substitution elasticity suggests there may exist the win win opportunities for so2 regulation moreover the large regional disparity highlights the needs to adopt a differentiated regional policy

rockets and feathers the asymmetric speed of adjustment of uk retail gasoline prices to cost changes abstract the paper develops a quadratic quantity adjustment model to test the hypothesis put forward in the recent monopolies and mergers commission report that the speed of adjustment of uk retail gasoline prices to cost changes is more rapid when costs rise than when they fall and that the adjustment path is more concentrated around the mean value on the upswing using data from 1982 to 1989 evidence of faster and more concentrated responses to cost increases were found

asymmetric effects of oil price changes on the balance of trade evidence from selected african countries the main new contribution of this study was to delve into the asymmetric impacts of changes in oil prices on the trade balance in the framework of six major african economies to tackle this topic carefully we employ three measures of external balances oil non oil and total trade balances and assess the asymmetric response of the external balances of those six economies to oil price changes in the short and long run like most previous studies we first assume the impacts of oil price fluctuations to be symmetric and employ the linear autoregressive distributed lag ardl method to explore the topic we then separate oil price hikes from oil price plunges and implement the non linear ardl method to reveal that the price of crude oil has a vital role to play in the trade balances for those six african economies further there is evidence of significant asymmetric impacts of oil prices typically on the oil trade balance of africa s top oil producing countries for the non oil and total trade balances in contrast there is little evidence of the asymmetry of oil price changes

industrial eco efficiency in china a provincial quantification using three stage data envelopment analysis abstract the coordinated development of industrialization and the ecological environment is vital to achieve ecological civilization in china integratively considering the economy energy and resources and environment this study aims to measure the industrial eco efficiency of 30 provinces autonomous regions and municipalities in china between 2005 and 2013 a three stage data envelopment analysis dea modeling approach is adopted to eliminate interference of the external environment and statistical noise with industrial eco efficiency measurement the results show that regional industrial eco efficiency in china is affected by the factors of the environmental regulation technological innovation level of economic development and industrial structure after eliminating the impacts of external environment and statistical noise china s national average industrial eco efficiency declines by 30 between 2005 and 2013 the industrial eco efficiency of the 30 provinces increases but at different rates of growth the variation of overall regional industrial eco efficiency is primarily caused by scale efficiency furthermore all the 30 provinces are classified into four groups to interpret the causes of variation and differences of regional industrial eco efficiency in general the management and technology level and the economy of scale of industries should be improved simultaneously even though specific opportunities for industrial eco efficiency improvement vary across provinces in china

energy security policies in eu 25 the expected cost of oil supply disruptions a framework for analyzing the impact on the expected cost of oil disruption by energy policies in eu 25 is developed the framework takes into account how energy policies affect the oil market the expected oil price increase and the disruption costs opec s strategic behaviour is modelled as a dominant firm and the model includes price interdependence between different energy commodities to better estimate the cost of an oil disruption it is found that substituting pellets for oil in households and using imported sugar cane ethanol are cost efficient policies if greenhouse gas benefits are included domestically produced wheat ethanol is not found to be cost efficient even if both the expected cost of oil disruption and greenhouse gas benefits are included the same also holds for hybrid vehicles the gross expected economic gain of the policies is found to be between 9 and 22 bbl oil replaced

are football managers as efficient as coaches performance analysis with ex ante and ex post inputs in the premier league there is a controversy on sport performance literature about what type of inputs might explain more deeply the performance of sports clubs inputs specification controversy by one side several p

cointegration and threshold adjustment this article proposes an extension to the engle granger testing strategy by permitting asymmetry in the adjustment toward equilibrium in two different ways we demonstrate that our test has good power and size properties over the engle granger test when there are asymmetric departures from equilibrium we consider an application namely whether there exists cointegration among interest rates for instruments with different maturities this issue has been widely tested with mixed results we argue that either cautious policy or possibly opportunistic behavior on the part of the federal reserve implies that an equilibrium relationship between short and long term interest rates exists but that adjustments from disequilibrium are asymmetric in nature empirical tests using u s yields confirm the asymmetric nature of error correction among interest rates of different maturities

forecasting volatility of crude oil markets abstract this article investigates the efficacy of a volatility model for three crude oil markets brent dubai and west texas intermediate wti with regard to its ability to forecast and identify volatility stylized facts in particular volatility persistence or long memory in this context we assess persistence in the volatility of the three crude oil prices using conditional volatility models the cgarch and figarch models are better equipped to capture persistence than are the garch and igarch models the cgarch and figarch models also provide superior performance in out of sample volatility forecasts we conclude that the cgarch and figarch models are useful for modeling and forecasting persistence in the volatility of crude oil prices

renewable energy oil prices and economic activity a granger causality in quantiles analysis this paper analyzes the causal relationship between renewable energy consumption oil prices and economic activity in the united states from july 1989 to july 2016 considering all quantiles of the distribution although the concept of granger causality is defined for the conditional distribution the majority of papers have tested granger causality using conditional mean regression models in which the causal relations are linear we apply a granger causality in quantiles analysis that evaluates causal relations in each quantile of the distribution under this approach we can discriminate between causality affecting the median and the tails of the conditional distribution we find evidence of bi directional causality between changes in renewable energy consumption and economic growth at the lowest tail of the distribution besides changes in renewable energy consumption lead economic growth at the highest tail of the distribution our results also support the unidirectional causality from fluctuations in oil prices to economic growth at the extreme quantiles of the distribution finally we find evidence of lower tail dependence from changes in oil prices to changes in renewable energy consumption our findings call for government policies aimed at developing renewable energy markets to increase energy efficiency in the u s

models of energy use putty putty versus putty clay energy use is inelastic in time series data but elastic in international cross section data two models of energy use reproduce these elasticities a putty putty model with adjustment costs developed by pindyck and rotemberg 1983 and a putty clay model in the pindyck rotemberg model capital and energy are highly complementary in both the short run and the long run in the putty clay model capital and energy are complementary in the short run but substitutable in the long run we highlight the differences in the cross section implications of the models by considering the effect of an energy tax on output in both models in the putty putty model an energy tax that doubles the price of energy leads to a fall in output in the long run of 33 in contrast the same tax in the putty clay model leads to a fall in output of only 5 3

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

financial sustainability and poverty outreach within a network of village banks in cameroon a multi dea approach abstract microfinance institutions face a double bottom line they perform financial tasks by giving microcredits to their customers and support projects aiming at reducing poverty in doing so they have to be financially self sufficient and to target poor people excluded from the traditional financial systems however a trade off may exist between financial sustainability and poverty outreach for these institutions by using a multi dea approach this paper shows that even if a trade off exists for 15 of the mc 2 mutuelles communautaires de croissance in cameroon there is no trade off for 46 of them in order to increase without trade off financial and social performance of inefficient mc 2 a benchmarking approach combing dea and performance indicators has been developed dea is used for identifying best practices and setting benchmarking goals performance indicators are used for characterizing areas needing improvements and following the evolution of mc 2 toward their goals i e for implementing benchmarking complementarity of both approaches provides a tool box for improving financial and social efficiency and reducing the trade off between financial sustainability and poverty outreach of microfinance institutions

dynamics of electricity consumption oil price and economic growth global perspective this study uses the data from 157 countries from 1960 to 2014 to analyze the relationship between economic growth electricity consumption oil prices capital and labor the economic growth of developing countries with industrial infrastructure has a more significant association with electricity consumption than oil prices we use oil prices and electricity consumption jointly to study highly predictive observations for economic growth the data are categorized by income oecd and regional levels the panel cointegration long run parameter estimation and pool mean group tests are used to analyze the cointegration and short run and long run relationships between the variables the empirical results indicate the presence of cointegration between the variables the presence of feedback effects between electricity consumption and economic growth oil prices and economic growth is valid these findings confirm that in spite of the oil prices developing countries rely heavily on electricity consumption for economic growth in the short run growth and feedback effects suggest that more vigorous electricity policies should be implemented to attain sustainable economic growth for the long term

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

advanced x efficiencies for ccr and bcc models towards peer based dea controlling abstract classical ccr and bcc dea models follow a general concept they allow each dmu to evaluate its in efficiency in the most favorable way and then propose input reduction and or output raise so as to follow its best practice units a first step beyond this self appraisal is the consideration of x efficiencies thus evaluating dmus with optimal weights of a peer doing this for all possible peers yields a cross efficiency matrix either for ccr or for bcc models this matrix might help to find a fair peer for the remaining dmus in a second step recent contributions analyze for ccr models how such x evaluated dmus might improve their efficiency with respect to a peer s weight system in these models even free variation of inputs outputs is possible rather than reduction and or raise such models will be portrayed here and generalized for variable returns to scale the remaining discomfort which a dmu might feel with the choice for peer among business rivals leads to the concept of a virtual peer vp this paper proposes such a peer as a consensual option for all dmus now for either return to scale ccr and bcc for an input or output oriented focus and by free variation of inputs and outputs they can meet the requirements of vp the dmus pay a heavy price however the peer controls their respective weights and even their activities he is a dictator

productivity and efficiency change and shareholder value evidence from the spanish banking sector productivity change and shareholder value have been analysed in the banking sector in the last few years although it should be noted that these two important aspects have been studied separately in this regard the main contribution of our study is to link these two lines of research by verifying whether those banks characterized by higher levels of efficiency and productivity change have a higher shareholder value to measure changes in efficiency and productivity we use the malmquist nonparametric technique which is calculated from data envelopment analysis dea linear programming approach the malmquist total factor productivity index enables separation of the catching up effect i e changes over time in technical efficiency from technological change i e the shift of best practice frontier over time due to technological progress our results for a sample of listed spanish banks in the period 2000 to 2004 confirm that those banks with higher efficiency and productivity changes have a higher

the impact of environmental expenditures on performance in the u s chemical industry abstract this study analyzes chemical industry companies with environmental expenditures to determine which ones have better financial performance in addition this study uses data envelopment analysis to evaluate the efficiency of firms with and without environmental expenditures this study also utilizes the malmquist productivity index mpi to analyze firms productivity change and a bootstrap method to test whether the indexes are statistically significant finally this study divides chemical industry companies into three main categories based on their products the results of this study provide significant evidence of a relationship between environmental expenditures and financial performance the findings suggest that firms with environmental expenditures have better efficiency and productivity hence the study encourages companies in the industry to put more effort into protecting the environment that can be through practicing cleaner production to create higher benefits

oil shock and economic growth in japan a nonlinear approach abstract this paper investigates the relationship between oil price shock and economic growth on the basis of the nonlinear approach developed by hamilton hamilton j 2001 a parametric approach to flexible nonlinear inference econometrica 537 573 we use the approach also in hamilton hamilton j 2003 what is an oil shock journal of econometrics 363 398 of capturing this relationship in japan in a nonlinear model the idea is that negative oil price shocks price increase tend to have larger impact on growth than positive shocks do our empirical evidence confirmed the existence of nonlinearity between these two variables and a flexible nonlinear model is estimated additionally several other form of nonlinearity are estimated and tested

strategic corporate social responsibility and economic performance this article proposes a novel corporate social responsibility csr index based on a data envelopment analysis dea model acknowledging the argument that companies might favour those csr dimensions that provide strategic competitive advantages we argue that the index can capture companies strategic approach to csr furthermore our findings reveal a neutral relationship between this strategic csr index and economic performance as measured by return on assets roa and tobin s q when controlling for firm unobserved heterogeneity and past economic performance by contrast an equally weighted index of the same csr indicators is found to be negatively related with roa which reinforces our claim that this specific dea based index is a measure of strategic csr

oil price shocks and the dispersion hypothesis recent research by david lilien shows that a significant fraction of aggregate unemployment can be explained by the dispersion of employment growth across industries this paper presents two new results in this area first it is shown that a significant fraction of the variation in lilien s dispersion index is due to the differential impact of oil shocks across industries second and more important it is shown that once the dispersion in employment growth due to oil shocks is accounted for the residual dispersion has no explanatory power for unemployment

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

cost efficiency of french rugby clubs this article analyses the cost efficiency of french first league rugby clubs using a stochastic frontier model the frontier estimation confirmed that the model fits the data well with all coefficients correctly signed and in line with the theoretical requirements the results show that one of the clubs is operating efficiently with the majority of clubs clustered around 20 inefficiency policy implications are derived

linking the gas and oil markets with the stock market investigating the u s relationship energy markets can represent a strategic advantage when they are supporting each other and specifically when energy segments are complementary enough to support economic development and growth in this light a high and strategic interest relies on the possible interactions between energy market segments as well as their impact on a given country s financial market the proposed research focuses on the interaction between the u s natural gas and u s crude oil markets on one side and their dependencies with the u s stock market on the other side after controlling for structural changes or breaks we characterize previous dependencies with the multivariate copula methodology first we assess the joint link prevailing between the natural gas and crude oil markets then we characterize the joint risk structure prevailing between previous energy markets and the u s stock market finally we assess the joint dependence structure between the natural gas crude oil and stock markets

modeling and forecasting crude oil markets using arch type models this study investigates the time varying volatility of two major crude oil markets the west texas intermediate wti and europe brent a flexible autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch model is used to take into account the stylized volatility facts such as clustering volatility asymmetric news impact and long memory volatility among others the empirical results indicate that the intensity of long persistence volatility in the wti is greater than in the brent it is also found that for the wti the appreciation and depreciation shocks of the wti have similar impact on the resulting volatility however a leverage effect is found in brent although both the estimation and diagnostic evaluations are in favor of an asymmetric long memory arch model only the wti models provide superior in the out of sample forecasts on the other hand from the empirical out of sample forecasts it appears that the simplest parsimonious generalized arch provides the best forecasted evaluations for the brent crude oil data

regulatory reforms and productivity an empirical analysis of the japanese electricity industry the japanese electricity industry has experienced regulatory reforms since the mid 1990s this article measures productivity in japan s steam power generation sector and examines the effect of reforms on the productivity of this industry over the period 1978 2003 we estimate the luenberger productivity indicator which is a generalization of the commonly used malmquist productivity index using a data envelopment analysis approach factors associated with productivity change are investigated through dynamic generalized method of moments gmm estimation of panel data our empirical analysis shows that the regulatory reforms have contributed to productivity growth in the steam power generation sector in japan

revisiting the relationship between spot and futures oil prices evidence from quantile cointegrating regression article i nfo since most real decisions depend upon current market states or whether it is advantageous to the participants themselves this paper revisits the relationship between spot and futures oil prices of west texas intermediate covering 1986 to 2009 with an innovative approach named quantile cointegration different to previous perspectives we target the issues of cointegrating relationships causalities and market efficiency based on different market states under different maturities of oil futures in our empirical analysis except for market efficiency long run cointegrating relationships and causalities between spot and futures oil prices have significant differentials among futures maturities and the performances of spot oil markets furthermore the response of spot prices to shocks in 1 month futures oil prices is much steeper in high spot prices than in low spot prices this phenomenon is consistent with the prospect theory kahneman and tversky 1979 in that the value function is generally steeper for losses than for gains

historical energy price shocks and their changing effects on the economy abstract the purpose of this paper is to identify the changes in the impact of energy shocks on economic activity with an interest in assessing if an economy s vulnerability and resilience to shocks improved with economic development using data on the united kingdom over the last three hundred years the paper identifies supply aggregate demand and residual shocks to energy prices and estimates their changing influence on energy prices and gdp the results suggest that the impacts of supply shocks rose with its increasing dependence on coal and declined with its partial transition to oil however the transition from exporting coal to importing oil increased the negative impacts of demand shocks more generally the results indicate that improvements in vulnerability and resilience to shocks did not progress systematically as the economy developed instead the changes in impacts depended greatly on the circumstances related to the demand for and supply of energy sources if these experiences are transferable to future markets a transition to a diversified mix of renewable energy is likely to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience to energy price shocks

hypercongestion in production correspondences an empirical exploration this empirical contribution reviews the rather limited existing literature measuring congestion in production it first compares current ways to measure congestion using nonparametric specifications of technologies in particular it focuses on the magnitude and incidence of the congestion detected in empirical studies using traditional radial efficiency measures thereafter it shows the limitations of this radial measurement and how alternative measurement schemes may reveal higher amounts of congestion then the new more general methodology of measuring s congestion is presented in particular we first present a numerical example to illustrate the way the s disposable technologies allow to capture more extreme forms of congestion by setting empirically determined upper bounds to the wasting of inputs then an empirical illustration is presented based on an existing sample of data a final section concludes

the impact of oil prices on gdp in european countries an empirical investigation based on asymmetric cointegration this paper investigates the existence of a long term relationship between oil prices and gdp in 12 european countries to account for the fact that economic activity responds asymmetrically to oil price shocks we propose an approach based on asymmetric cointegration our results show that while standard cointegration is rejected there is evidence for asymmetric cointegration between oil prices and gdp in the majority of the considered european countries

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

contestable markets an uprising in the theory of industry structure presents a transcript of the presidential address delivered at the 94th meeting of the american economic association on december 29 1981 discussion of developments in the theory of industry structure welfare attributes of contestable markets behavior characteristics of oligopoly equilibrium intertemporal vulnerability to inefficient entry ebsco

cost efficiency of electric grid utilities in china a comparison of estimates from sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls with the purpose of estimating the range of cost efficiency levels of the power grid sector in china we assembled a data set including 23 provincial power grid companies spanning from 2005 to 2009 and conducted an empirical study based on the sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls methodologies empirical results show that the average values of efficiency from different models vary from 0 85 to 0 92 depending especially on the assumptions underlying inefficiency content further results demonstrate that there is exogenous technical progress during the sample period and per capita gdp of the province is negatively related to the costs of the electric grid company located in the corresponding province we hope this empirical study will contribute to the debate on an efficiency based regulation scheme which was introduced to the chinese electric grid sector on a pilot base in 2014

oil price movements and macroeconomic performance evidence from twenty six oecd countries abstract this study investigates the relationship between oil price movements and macroeconomic aggregates such as gross domestic product gdp consumer prices cpi and unemployment for oecd countries to do this second generation econometric methods have been employed to panel data including panel unit root tests panel cointegration tests and panel long run models panel unit root tests suggest that oil prices plus selected macroeconomic aggregates in oecd countries are non stationary at levels but become stationary at first differences in the existence of multiple structural breaks five structural break points have successfully been investigated in the series of this study during panel unit root and panel cointegration tests durbin h panel co integration tests confirm that there is a long term relationship between oil prices and those macroeconomic aggregates on the other hand results of this study reveal that the price of oil exerts statistically and negatively significant impacts on gdp cpi and unemployment in the case of oecd countries in general

a dynamic multi stage data envelopment analysis model with application to energy consumption in the cotton industry abstract data envelopment analysis dea is a non parametric method for evaluating the relative efficiency of homogenous decision making units dmus with multiple inputs and outputs in this paper we present a dynamic multi stage dea dms dea approach to evaluate the efficiency of cotton production energy consumption in the proposed model the farms which consume resources i e fertilizers seeds and pesticides to produce cotton are assumed to be the dmus inputs not consumed during a planning period are carried over to the next period in the planning horizon initially a dms dea model is used to determine the overall efficiency of the dmus with dynamic inputs next the efficiency score of each dmu is calculated for each time period in the planning horizon we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method and exhibit the efficacy of the procedures and algorithms with a real life case study of energy consumption in the cotton industry

the adjusted spherical frontier model with weight restrictions abstract this paper presents the asfm lp model a parametric data envelopment analysis dea model for allocating resources commonly called inputs this model considers that a fair allocation of inputs is one that maximizes the dea ccr efficiencies of the decision making units dmus the main assumption of the asfm lp is the predefined spherical shape of the efficiency frontier we have demonstrated that our method extends the existing parametric model asfm to allow the introduction of weight restrictions which has great importance in practical applications of dea numeric examples are presented to show the application of the method

the effects of oil prices on the price indices in taiwan international or domestic oil prices matter abstract this study employs the multivariate threshold model developed by tsay 1998 to examine the effects of international and domestic oil prices on the price indices in taiwan using monthly data from january 1999 to december 2011 the results show that changes in domestic oil prices do not granger cause changes in the price indices when the oil price change exceeds the threshold level however international oil price shocks still affect the wholesale price index through the effects of announcement and expectation therefore controlling domestic oil prices to prevent volatility in the price indices is ineffective if we focus on the period when the left wing party is in power we also find that changes in international oil prices have more critical effects on the price indices than changes in domestic oil prices however the lead lag relationship between changes in domestic oil prices and changes in the price indices vanishes except with respect to the transportation category where the consumer price index is affected by domestic oil prices this result may be due to the government s extensive intervention in setting oil prices

impact of oil price shocks on selected macroeconomic variables in nigeria abstract the impact of oil price shocks on the macroeconomy has received a great deal of attention since the 1970 s initially many empirical studies found a significant negative effect between oil price shocks and gdp but more recently empirical studies have reported an insignificant relationship between oil shocks and the macroeconomy a key feature of existing research is that it applies predominantly to advanced oil importing countries for oil exporting countries different conclusions are expected but this can only be ascertained empirically this study conducts an empirical analysis of the effects of oil price shocks on a developing country oil exporter nigeria our findings showed that oil price shocks do not have a major impact on most macroeconomic variables in nigeria the results of the granger causality tests impulse response functions and variance decomposition analysis all showed that different measures of linear and positive oil shocks have not caused output government expenditure inflation and the real exchange rate the tests support the existence of asymmetric effects of oil price shocks because we find that negative oil shocks significantly cause output and the real exchange rate

asymmetry in retail gasoline and crude oil price movements in the united states an application of hidden cointegration technique abstract there is a common belief that gasoline prices respond more quickly to crude oil price increases than decreases some economists and politicians believe that asymmetry in oil and gasoline price movements is the outcome of a non competitive gasoline market requiring that governments take policy action to address unfair pricing there is no consensus as to the existence or nature of the asymmetric relationship between prices of gasoline and crude oil much of this literature specifies asymmetry in the speed of adjustment and short run adjustment coefficients in contrast granger and yoon s granger c w and yoon g hidden cointegration university of california san diego department of economics working paper 2002 crouching error correction model cecm identifies asymmetry of the cointegrating vectors between components cumulative positive and negative changes of the series applying the cecm to retail gasoline and crude oil prices for the u s we find that there is only evidence of cointegration between positive components of crude oil prices and negative components of gasoline prices in contrast to the literature which attributes asymmetric price movements to market power of refiners these findings suggest that gasoline prices in the long run are more influenced by the technological changes on the demand side than crude oil price movements on the supply side

a scale elasticity measure for directional distance function and its dual theory and dea estimation abstract in this paper we focus on scale elasticity measure based on directional distance function for multi output multi input technologies explore its fundamental properties and show its equivalence with the input oriented and output oriented scale elasticity measures we also establish duality relationship between the scale elasticity measure based on the directional distance function with scale elasticity measure based on the profit function finally we discuss the estimation issues of the scale elasticity based on the directional distance function via the dea estimator

the impact of energy price uncertainty on macroeconomic variables abstract this paper evaluates the macroeconomic implications of energy price volatility through the lens of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model in an open economy the model develops a small open economy in which households consume energy products and firms use energy as productivity inputs where the country is so small that it needs to import energy the price of which is determined abroad whereas positive energy price shocks cause an economic slowdown due to higher costs for consumers and firms energy price volatility shocks generate an increase in gdp in the short run and a reversal in the long run these findings are empirically supported by estimates from a panel var model applied to 10 asian economies where energy price volatility has a positive impact on gdp in the short run moreover the paper finds that increasing demand or supply uncertainty also affect energy prices with amplified fluctuations relative to a model that abstracts from energy market volatility leads households to cut consumption for precautionary savings motives which in turn increases investment both energy price and uncertainty fluctuation lead to high macroeconomic volatility in the business cycle policy makers should encourage investment in energy security and renewable energy such that households and firms would become less responding to fluctuations in the non renewable energy market

oil prices stock markets and portfolio investment evidence from sector analysis in europe over the last decade this article extends the understanding of oil stock market relationships over the last turbulent decade unlike previous empirical investigations which have largely focused on broad based market indices national and or regional indices we examine short term linkages in the aggregate as well as sector by sector levels in europe using different econometric techniques our main findings suggest that the reactions of stock returns to oil price changes differ greatly depending on the activity sector in the out of sample analysis we show that introducing oil asset into a diversified portfolio of stocks allows to significantly improve its risk return characteristics

using dea to evaluate 29 canadian textile companies considering returns to scale in this research we use data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the performance of 29 canadian textile companies in 1994 using the charnes cooper and rodes ccr model in dea we first obtain the results of efficiency scores and returns to scale of 29 canadian textile companies we then focus on the returns to scale to examine the possibility of utilizing the inefficient inputs by either further expansion or vertical integration we develop a mathematical model to consider the trade off between reducing and not reducing the input surplus we use the cone ratio model to find the optimal level of vertical utilization the computational results are based on real data from the canadian textile companies

green logistics and national scale economic indicators evidence from a panel of selected european countries abstract the objective of the study is to examine the impact of logistics performance indices on national scale economic indicators i e energy environment and economic health in a panel of 27 european countries over a period of 2007 2014 the results show that logistics performance index in terms of timeliness significantly increases gdp per unit of energy use health expenditures and per capita income where as logistics index in terms of infrastructure increases renewable energy source and decreases carbon emissions logistics index for customs processes significantly associated with the less energy prices while logistics index for tracking and trace consignments substantially increases fossil fuel energy consumption logistics competence index have a differential impact on environment on one hand it substantially reduce the burden of fossil fuel energy consumption while on the other hand it s significantly increases carbon emissions logistics international shipments increase fossil fuel energy in a region industry value added and fdi inflows both increases energy prices fossil fuel energy health expenditures and per capita income whereas trade openness decreases energy prices and increases carbon emissions energy efficiency and per capita income the results conclude that logistics indices significantly linked with the national scale economic indicators that provoke for the green supply chain management in the region

the measurement of productive efficiency a reconsideration the purpose of this paper is to generalize the farrell indexes of productive efficiency to nonhomothetic production technologies and at the same time maintain the cost interpretation of the farrell measures since the generalized indexes rely heavily on recent developments in the estimation of frontier cost and production functions several frontier models are reviewed in addition to generalized indexes of technical allocative and overall productive efficiency a variety of single factor efficiency measures are discussed the applicability of the proposed efficiency measures is illustrated with a numerical example of electric power generation

assessing eco efficiency through the dea analysis and decoupling index in the latin america countries abstract this study was developed according to a two step approach in the first step we provide an investigation of the changes in eco efficiency under constant and variable return to scale while on a second step the evaluation of the decoupling elasticity will be given the impacts of energy economic and environmental determinants inputs on the performance indicators of eco efficiency were calculated as the inverse of the carbon intensity ratio of the gdp over the co2 emissions both from the world development indicators database the changes in eco efficiency and the decoupling elasticity between co2 emissions and economic growth changes data was used for 16 latin america countries according to five year periods from 1994 to 2013 for all the five time span considered it is worth noting that the degree of technical efficiency for the latin america countries is lower than the degree of technological efficiency thus indicating that a portion of the overall inefficiency is due to the fact that these countries are producing below the production frontier rather than to an inefficient use of technology on average the results have confirmed that the technological scale change in energy production is the dominant factor influencing the optimal production frontier in the sample of countries under analysis complementarily according to the mixed results from the decoupling analysis we may conclude that the increase decrease of the co2 per capita emissions was due to other economic and environmental factors rather than to a negative positive effect of the gdp growth rate

exploring the existence of kuznets curve in countries environmental efficiency using dea window analysis abstract this paper using data envelopment dea window analysis and generalized method of moments gmm estimators examines the existence of a kuznets type relationship between countries environmental efficiency and national income specifically it measures the environmental efficiency of 17 oecd countries by constructing environmental efficiency ratios for the time period 1980 2002 the analysis with the application of dynamic panel data reveals that there isn t a kuznets type relationship between environmental efficiency and income allowing for dynamic effects we find that the adjustment to the target ratio is instantaneous we also find that increased economic activity does not always ensure environmental protection and thus the path of growth is important in addition to the growth itself

efficiency subsidies and environmental adaptation of animal farming under cap the purpose of this article is to model the interaction between the targets of the current cap environmental adaptation subsidies and efficiency q1 of animal farming to this end we first have to identify the production frontier and relative efficiency level for each animal oriented farm in the sample the production frontier and efficiency index for each type of farm assuming no specific production functions are identified using data envelope analysis dea techniques we then address the relationship between relative efficiency farm size and environmentally friendly behavior by carrying out a nonparametric regression of efficiency on economic size a proxy for the degree of environmental appropriateness and regional dummies calculations of the efficiency of the farms including direct subsidies are compared with the counterfactual exercise in the case in which direct subsidies are not considered finally we look for relations between subsidies and factors such as farm size efficiency and environmentally friendly behavior one key result shows that on average direct payments generally tend to increase efficiency however in most of the cases the mean efficiency decreases as the percentage of direct payments rises direct payments are found to be positively related to environmentally friendly production at least in germany however in general the direct payment system is not sufficient to offset the fact that the less environmentally friendly farms as well as the larger farms are more efficient

strategic planning of optimal resource allocation in response to global financial crisis a study of international tourist hotels this study is principally designed to examine the changes in the efficiency effective resource allocation and future operation strategies of taiwan s international tourist hotel in global economic downturn at first we set up critical input and output factors and construct an assessment model using data envelopment analysis dea for analysis of relative efficiency further we apply an allocative efficiency model for additional considerations of each input cost and analyse proper and effective resource allocation finally there are significant changes in overall efficiency of international tourist hotels under global financial crisis we can also reach an effective allocation of the overall resources in such cases lowering cost has become a key issue for sustainable operation of international tourist hotel finally the greatest contribution of this study is to further classify the competitiveness and optimal cost allocation of taiwan s international tourist hotels into seven categories based on the

measuring technical efficiency and productivity growth a comparison of sfa and dea on norwegian grain production data this article compares data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to assess efficiency and productivity growth of norwegian grain producers previous studies have dealt with either one of them and less of both for the assessment of productivity growth or regress malmquist productivity indices are derived from both approaches the data cover a 10 year period we find consistency between the approaches to the extent that 1 there are potentials for efficiency improvements but the magnitudes depends on the model applied and by segmentation of the data set 2 there has been a productivity improvement in the sector on average in the interval 30 38 in the period studied and 3 technical change has had the greatest impact on productivity indicating that producers have a tendency to catch up with the front runners in general policy makers are warned not to be indifferent with respect to the approach used for efficiency and productivity measurement as these may give different results

the effects of oil price shocks on asian exchange rates evidence from quantile regression analysis abstract this paper investigates the effects of oil price shocks on asian exchange rates we employ quantile regression analysis and allow for structural breaks and asymmetry our results indicate that positive and negative oil price shocks have asymmetrical effects on exchange rate returns that vary in significance size and sign throughout the distribution of exchange rate returns the impact of oil price shocks is also affected by market conditions bearish and bullish currency markets during bullish markets in domestic currencies at lower quantiles of currency movements in terms of u s dollar exchange rates rising oil prices cause further appreciation for indonesia korea the philippines and thailand currencies during bearish markets in the domestic currencies at higher quantiles of exchange rate movements in terms of u s dollar exchange rates rising falling oil price causes further currency depreciation for indonesia malaysia thus currencies respond differently to oil price shocks under extreme bullish or bearish currency market conditions and the impact of rising or falling oil prices on foreign exchange markets can vary by country and market conditions

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