kinship in the shadow of the corporation the interbuilder network in clyde river shipbuilding 1711 1990 the authors identify a system of intercompetitor affiliation that helped clyde river shipbuilding companies to thrive but was ultimately undermined by the rise of corporate capitalism they find that connections between companies through their leaders family ties or friendships were common and beneficial as every such tie maintained by a company reduced its annual risk of failure by 10 percent this average effect however masks an important contingency the direct benefits of interbuilder ties accrued only to family firms which enjoyed a reduced risk of failure of 34 percent with each tie and not at all to corporations the authors maintain that the shift to the corporate form inhibited the operation of the interbuilder network by reducing the autonomy of leaders to work through personal relations with their competitors the results encourage heightened attention both to the idea that horizontal ties within an industry may be a key determinant of organizational success and to the idea that some m

macroeconomic forecasting in the euro area country specific versus area wide information abstract this paper compares several time series methods for short run forecasting of euro wide inflation and real activity using data from 1982 to 1997 forecasts are constructed from univariate autoregressions vector autoregressions single equation models that include euro wide and us aggregates and large model methods in which forecasts are based on estimates of common dynamic factors aggregate euro wide forecasts are constructed from models that utilize only aggregate euro wide variables and by aggregating country specific models the results suggest that forecasts constructed by aggregating the country specific models are more accurate than forecasts constructed using the aggregate data

international search behavior of business group affiliated firms scope of institutional changes and intragroup heterogeneity this paper investigates whether and when affiliation to business groups enables or constrains firms international search behavior during institutional transitions we theorize that given the unique structure and complex form of business group organizations the search behavior of affiliated firms is influenced by the degree of misalignment in outlook at the group and affiliate levels of management we identify the scope of institutional changes business group attributes and affiliate characteristics as sources of such misalignment the results from panel data on 298 firms from the indian pharmaceutical industry for the 1992 2007 period show that the constraining effects of business group affiliation are observed only when institutional changes are specific to the affiliates industry and not when broad institutional changes affect the business group as a whole moreover we observe heterogeneity in the search behavior of group affiliated firms first the degree of misalignment is greater in the case of affiliates belonging to older business groups and those that are more distant in terms of age and industry since the group s founding second by contrast and suggesting an alignment in outlook we find that affiliated firms that occupy a prominent position within a group or industry are able to bargain for and receive attention and support from the business group to undertake international search our findings have implications for research on the role of business groups in a changing institutional context and for the strategic adaptation of firms embedded in complex organizational and institutional settings

the effects of oil price uncertainty on global real economic activity this paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on global real economic activity using a quarterly vector autoregressive model with stochastic volatility in mean stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices and allows one to incorporate an extraneous indicator of oil price uncertainty such as realized volatility that greatly improves the precision of the estimated uncertainty series the estimation results show that an oil price uncertainty shock has negative effects on world industrial production all else equal for example it is shown that a doubling of oil price volatility is associated with a cumulative decline as high as 0 3 percentage points in world industrial production

nowcasting the real time informational content of macroeconomic data abstract a formal method is developed for evaluating the marginal impact that intra monthly data releases have on current quarter forecasts nowcasts of real gross domestic product gdp growth the method can track the real time flow of the type of information monitored by central banks because it can handle large data sets with staggered data release dates each time new data are released the nowcasts are updated on the basis of progressively larger data sets that reflecting the unsynchronized data release dates have a jagged edge across the most recent months

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 response of firms to eligibility thresholds evidence from the japanese value added tax abstract it is common to define benefit eligibility for small business policies by restrictions on the firm size this paper documents the effects of the value added tax vat threshold in japan focusing on the incentives for a large firm to masquerade as many small firms by separately incorporating business segments a comparison of the corporate size distributions before and after the vat introduction of 1989 shows a clustering of corporations just below the threshold a pattern that is attributable to the behavioral responses to rule out the confounding influences of the changes in the company attributes over the years we applied a semiparametric density decomposition technique developed by dinardo fortin and lemieux dinardo j fortin n m lemieux t labor market institutions and the distribution of wages 1973 1992 a semiparametric approach econometrica 1996 64 1001 1044 this study suggests that the masquerading behavior by firms may be commonplace in other settings

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

realized volatility transmission the role of jumps and leverage effects this paper is the first to employ a multivariate extension of the lhar cj model for realized volatility of corsi and reno 2012 considering continuous and jump volatility components and leverage effects the model is applied to financial s p 500 commodity wti crude oil and forex us eur intraday futures data and allows new insights in the transmission mechanisms among these markets besides significant leverage effects we find that the jump components of all considered assets do not contain incremental information for the one step ahead realized volatility the volatility of s p 500 and us eur exchange rate futures exhibits significant spillovers to the realized volatility of wti moreover decreasing equity prices appear to increase volatility in other markets while strengthening of the us seems to calm down the crude oil market

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

understanding the large negative impact of oil shocks this paper oers a plausible explanation for the close link between oil prices and aggregate macroeconomic performance in the 1970s although this link has been well documented in the empirical literature standard economic models are not able to replicate this link when actual oil prices are used to simulate the models in particular standard models cannot explain the depth of the recession in 1974 75 and the strong revival in 1976 78 based on the oil price movements in that period this paper argues that a missing multiplier accelerator mechanism from standard models may hold the key

why don t oil shocks cause inflation evidence from disaggregate inflation data this paper uses disaggregate u s inflation data to evaluate explanations for the breakdown of the relationship between oil price shocks and consumer price inflation a data set with measures of inflation energy intensity labor intensity and sensitivity to monetary policy is constructed for 97 sectors that make up core cpi inflation a comparison of the 1973 85 and 1986 2006 time periods reveals that substitution away from energy use in production and monetary policy were both important with approximately two thirds of the change in response of inflation to oil shocks being due to reduced energy usage and one third to monetary policy we find no evidence that other factors such as changes in wage rigidities or changes in the persistence of oil shocks played a role

what central bankers need to know about forecasting oil prices central banks routinely use short horizon forecasts of the quarterly price of oil in assessing the global and domestic economic outlook we address a number of econometric issues specific to the construction of quarterly oil price forecasts in the united states and abroad we show that quarterly forecasts of the real price of oil from suitably designed vector autoregressive models estimated on monthly data generate the most accurate real time forecasts overall among a wide range of methods including quarterly averages of forecasts based on monthly oil futures prices no change forecasts and forecasts based on regression models estimated on quarterly data

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

oil prices and the terms of trade abstract the combination of substantial terms of trade variability and unstable correlation patterns of trade prices with output and trade volumes has led some to suggest a break in the link between trade volumes and prices we find that oil accounts for much of the variation in the terms of trade over the last twenty five years and its quantitative role varies significantly over time and since our dynamic general equilibrium model predicts that the economy responds differently to oil supply shocks than to other shocks changes in their relative importance helps to account for the unstable correlations in the data

dynamics of oil price precious metal prices and exchange rate this study examines the co movements and information transmission among the spot prices of four precious metals gold silver platinum and palladium oil price and the us dollar euro exchange rate we find evidence of a weak long run equilibrium relationship but strong feedbacks in the short run the spot precious metal markets respond significantly but temporarily to a shock in any of the prices of the other metal prices and the exchange rate furthermore we discover some evidence of market overreactions in the palladium and platinum cases as well as in the exchange rate market in conclusion whether there are overreactions and re adjustments or not investors may diversify at least a portion of the risk away by investing in precious metals oil and the euro policy implications are provided

strategy meets institutions the transformation of management labor relations at deutsche telekom and ntt this comparison of labor management relations at deutsche telekom dt and ntt group formerly nippon telephone and telegraph demonstrates the value of considering both institutions and strategic decision making to under stand the interaction between companies and unions as corporations diversify multi divisional or holding company structures emerge but the degree of diversity introduced in employment relations within the corporate group de pends on the interaction between corporate strategy and the strategy of orga nized labor the authors field research based on interviews with managers and labor leaders shows that despite a broadly similar corporate strategy of diversi fication by dt and ntt after the liberalization of telecommunication markets employment relations became more decentralized both for unions and for works councils within the dt group than within the ntt group this differ ence in outcomes is explained by the relative power and strategic choices of labor and management rather than by constraints and opportunities specific to the existing national institutions

forecasting oil prices high frequency financial data are indeed useful abstract the paper examines the importance of combining high frequency financial information along with the oil market fundamentals in order to gain incremental forecasting accuracy for oil prices inspired by french et al 1987 and bollerslev et al 1988 who maintain that future asset returns are also influenced by past volatility we use daily volatilities and returns from financial and commodity markets to generate real out of sample forecasts for the monthly oil futures prices our results convincingly show that although the oil market fundamentals are useful for long run forecasting horizons the combination of the latter with high frequency financial data significantly improve oil price forecasts by reducing the rmse of the no change forecast by approximately 68 results are even more impressive during the oil price collapse period of 2014 15 these findings suggest that we cannot ignore the information extracted from the financial markets when forecasting oil prices our results are both statistically and economically significant as suggested by several robustness tests

quantifying the speculative component in the real price of oil the role of global oil inventories abstract one of the central questions of policy interest in recent years has been how many dollars of the inflation adjusted price of oil must be attributed to speculative demand for oil stocks at each point in time we develop statistical tools that allow us to address this question and we use these tools to explore how the use of two alternative proxies for global crude oil inventories affects the empirical evidence for speculation notwithstanding some differences overall these inventory proxies yield similar results while there is evidence of speculative demand raising the price in mid 2008 by between 5 and 14 dollars depending on the inventory specification there is no evidence of speculative demand pressures between early 2003 and early 2008 as a result current policy efforts aimed at tightening the regulation of oil derivatives markets cannot be expected to lower the real price of oil in the physical market we also provide evidence that the libyan crisis in 2011 shifted expectations in oil markets resulting in a price increase of between 3 and 13 dollars depending on the inventory specification with regard to tensions with iran in 2012 the implied price premium ranges from 0 to 9 dollars

coase revisited business groups in the modern economy ronald coase s celebrated query as to why economic actors typically aggregate into entities called firms rather than transacting as individuals in a market has engendered a vigorous stream of research this paper asks a parallel question why is it that in all modern economies firms themselves aggregate into larger entities often more stable than any literature predicts which are here referred to as business groups after establishing some working definitions and discussing the curious conjunction of empirical importance and analytical invisibility of business groups an attempt is made to establish the most significant dimensions along which such groups vary we end with some speculations on the role of these groups in economic development copyright 1995 by oxford university press

modeling volatility and correlations between emerging market stock prices and the prices of copper oil and wheat abstract increased financial integration between countries and the financialization of commodity markets are providing investors with new ways to diversify their investment portfolios this paper uses varma agarch and dcc agarch models to model volatilities and conditional correlations between emerging market stock prices copper prices oil prices and wheat prices the dynamic conditional correlation model is found to fit the data the best and used to generate dynamic conditional correlations hedge ratios and optimal portfolio weights emerging market stock prices and oil prices display leverage effects where negative residuals tend to increase the variance conditional volatility more than positive ones correlations between these assets increased considerably after 2008 and have yet to return to their pre 2008 values on average oil provides the cheapest hedge for emerging market stock prices while copper is the most expensive but given the variability in the hedge ratios one should probably not put too much emphasis on average hedge ratios

the effects of crude oil shocks on stock market shifts behaviour a regime switching approach abstract in this paper we develop a two regime markov switching egarch model introduced by henry henry o 2009 regime switching in the relationship between equity returns and short term interest rates journal of banking and finance 33 405 414 to examine the relationship between crude oil shocks and stock markets an application to stock markets of uk france and japan over the sample period january 1989 to december 2007 illustrates plausible results we detect two episodes of series behaviour one relative to low mean high variance regime and the other to high mean low variance regime furthermore there is evidence that common recessions coincide with the low mean high variance regime in addition we allow both real stock returns and probability of transitions from one regime to another to depend on the net oil price increase variable the findings show that rises in oil price has a significant role in determining both the volatility of stock returns and the probability of transition across regimes

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

ownership and firm innovation in a transition economy evidence from china we examine innovation performance of firms in a transition economy from an ownership perspective we focus specifically on the relationship between ownership structures and firm innovation performance drawing on data from 548 chinese firms we find volume of patent registration to be most strongly influenced by foreign ownership in the firm along with firm affiliation within a business group the influence of state and institutional ownership on innovation performance is positive but lagged contrary to expectations insider ownership leads to lower innovation performance and concentrated ownership has no significant impact our study has two principal contributions firstly we utilize a comprehensive treatment of ownership characteristics overcoming weakness in previous studies that have used a more narrow focus on ownership type secondly we contribute to understanding of how firms in transition economies build indigenous capabilities for innovation by drawing attention to the interplay of foreign and domestic control of agents innovation

macroeconomic forecasting with mixed frequency data forecasting output growth in the united states many macroeconomic series such as u s real output growth are sampled quarterly although potentially useful predictors are often observed at a higher frequency we look at whether a mixed data frequency sampling midas approach can improve forecasts of output growth the midas specification used in the comparison uses a novel way of including an autoregressive term we find that the use of monthly data on the current quarter leads to significant improvement in forecasting current and next quarter output growth and that midas is an effective way to exploit monthly data compared with alternative methods

are there gains from pooling real time oil price forecasts the answer as to whether there are gains from pooling real time oil price forecasts depends on the objective the approach of combining five of the leading forecasting models with equal weights dominates the strategy of selecting one model and using it for all horizons up to two years

realized volatility transmission between crude oil and equity futures markets a multivariate har approach this paper differs from extant literature because it studies volatility co movements with a multivariate orthogonalized har model a flexible specification for the time series of realized volatility which is able to identify short mid and long term spillover effects we examine volatility transmission mechanisms using high frequency data of the stock index futures on s p 500 nikkei 225 ftse 100 and the futures on the west texas intermediate crude oil during the period from september 2002 to september 2012 considering the full sample the short term volatility of the equity futures contains information about future oil volatility incremental to the information inherent in the time series of oil volatility on the other hand weekly and monthly volatilities do not exhibit a significant spillover effect breaking the whole sample into three subsamples no significant granger causalities are observed in the pre crisis period while in the crisis time and its aftermath we document that the us and uk equity market volatilities to granger cause the oil futures volatility which itself leads the japanese market in terms of magnitude we observe an increase in the short term volatility spillover over time studying the residuals of the har transmission models within a ccc dcc garch framework reveals increasing instantaneous correlation between the energy and equity volatilities in the course of time

dynamic spillovers of oil price shocks and economic policy uncertainty this study examines the dynamic relationship between changes in oil prices and the economic policy uncertainty index for a sample of both net oil exporting and net oil importing countries over the period 1997 01 2013 06 to achieve that an extension of the diebold and yilmaz 2009 2012 dynamic spillover index based on structural decomposition is employed the results reveal that economic policy uncertainty oil price shocks responds negatively to aggregate demand oil price shocks economic policy uncertainty shocks furthermore during the great recession of 2007 2009 total spillovers increase considerably reaching unprecedented heights moreover in net terms economic policy uncertainty becomes the dominant transmitter of shocks between 1997 and 2009 while in the post 2009 period there is a significant role for supply side and oil specific demand shocks as net transmitters of spillover effects these results are important for policy makers as well as investors interested in the oil market

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

the neglect of society in the theory of the firm a systems theory perspective the prevailing theories of the firm acknowledge the importance of trust and loyalty but neglect such behaviour in the substance of their analyses the present paper unravels this paradox by drawing on niklas luhmann s ground breaking insight that the complexity reducing function of social systems leads them to neglect their critical environmental dependencies thereby compromising their own sustainability if the firm is conceived as a social system luhmann s theory implies that the neglect of social behaviour by the predominant theories of the firm can be explained as reflecting the neglect of society by actual firms this argument promises to not only furnish the theory of the firm with a concern for sustainability but also render it more amenable to unconventional institutions such as cooperatives and non profit organisations that help compensate for the damage inflicted by conventional firms on the social environment

information acquisition in interdependent value auctions we consider an auction environment with interdependent values each bidder can learn her payoff type through costly information acquisition we contrast the socially optimal decision to acquire information with the equilibrium solution in which each agent has to privately bear the cost of information acquisition in the context of the generalized vickrey clarke groves mechanism we establish that the equilibrium level exceeds the socially optimal level of information with positive interdependence the individual decisions to acquire information are strategic substitutes the difference between the equilibrium and the efficient level of information acquisition is increasing in the interdependence of the bidders valuations and decreasing in the number of informed bidders jel c72 c73 d43 d83

forecasting oil price movements with crack spread futures abstract in oil markets the crack spread refers to the crude product price relationship refiners are major participants in oil markets and they are primarily exposed to the crack spread in other words refiner activity is substantially driven by the objective of protecting the crack spread moreover oil consumers are active participants in the oil hedging market and they are frequently exposed to the crack spread from another perspective hedge funds are heavily using crack spread to speculate in oil markets based on the high volume of crack spread futures trading in oil markets the question we want to raise is whether the crack spread futures can be a good predictor of oil price movements we investigated first whether there is a causal relationship between the crack spread futures and the spot oil markets in a vector error correction framework we found the causal impact of crack spread futures on spot oil market both in the long and the short run after april 2003 where we detected a structural break in the model to examine the forecasting performance we use the random walk model rwm as a benchmark and we also evaluate the forecasting power of crack spread futures against the crude oil futures the results showed that a both the crack spread futures and the crude oil futures outperformed the rwm and b the crack spread futures are almost as good as the crude oil futures in predicting the movements in spot oil markets

owner managers and firm performance during the asian and global financial crises evidence from korea abstractwe examine the performance of the korean owner managers during the 1997 1998 asian financial crisis and the 2008 2009 global financial crisis to establish whether they overcome the unexpected exterior shocks better than employed managers we find that the owner managers record a significantly greater performance during the crises and especially during the latter period moreover our results suggest that such a tendency comes from the owner managers superior investment decisions our paper thus highlights the role of owner managers by studying their performance during the korean economic crisis periods jel g01 g32 g34

anonymous market and group ties in international trade abstract history provides many examples of cohesive groups dispersed over several countries who exploit the ties between their members to gain entry into foreign markets the phenomenon is well established empirically and noteworthy because it suggests the importance of informational barriers in international transactions we present a simple model where output is produced through a joint venture and agents have complete information domestically but are unable to judge the quality of their match abroad a minority of individuals otherwise identical to all others can exploit complete information in international matches between group members if they so choose group ties increase aggregate trade and income but hurt the anonymous market because they deprive it disproportionately of the group s more productive members

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

social status entry and predation the case of british shipping cartels 1879 1929 the authors incorporate social status and regional affiliation two variables of central sociological interest into an economic analysis of entry and predation they build on scott morton s 1997 examination of entry and predation in the merchant shipping industry and examine whether the social status of an entrant owner impacts on the predation behavior of the incumbent cartels they find that high social status entrants are significantly less likely 40 to be preyed upon than the low social status entrants they discuss several interpretations of this result subsequent analysis supports the hypothesis that cartel members use social status as an indicator of an entrant s propensity to be a cooperative cartel participant

monetary policy response to oil price shocks how should monetary authorities react to an oil price shock this paper shows that in a noncompetitive economy policies that perfectly stabilize prices entail large welfare costs hence explaining the reluctance of policymakers to enforce them the policy trade off is nontrivial because oil energy is an input to both production and consumption as welfare maximizing policies are hard to implement and communicate i derive a simple interest rate rule that depends only on observables but mimics the optimal plan in all dimensions the optimal rule is hard on core inflation but accommodates oil price changes

forecasting oil price realized volatility using information channels from other asset classes motivated from ross 1989 who maintains that asset volatilities are synonymous to the information flow we claim that cross market volatility transmission effects are synonymous to cross market information flows or information channels from one market to another based on this assertion we assess whether cross market volatility flows contain important information that can improve the accuracy of oil price realized volatility forecasting we concentrate on realized volatilities derived from the intra day prices of the brent crude oil and four different asset classes stocks forex commodities and macro which represent the different information channels by which oil price volatility is impacted from we employ a har framework and estimate forecasts for 1 day to 66 days ahead our findings provide strong evidence that the use of the different information channels enhances the predictive accuracy of oil price realized volatility at all forecasting horizons numerous forecasting evaluation tests and alternative model specifications confirm the robustness of our results

institutions economics and the development quest institutions crucial for the analysis of how agents deal with uncertainty have been gaining increasing relevance on the economic research agenda in this paper we analyze the institutional literature aiming to explain why this perspective obtains better results than others in development economics in particular we stress the relevance of new institutional economics as an adequate framework for a broad understanding of development issues

steady change the 200 largest us manufacturing firms throughout the 20th century this paper discusses the existence of structural change in business activity and technological competence among the 200 largest us manufacturing companies throughout the 20th century the data were taken from chandler scale and scope 1990 and fortune magazine the analysis of corporate evolution in used to assess continuity versus turbulence of business organizations in the context of the neo schumpeterian long wave hypothesis the empirical results show that the giants of the late 20th century are not the same as those at the beginning of that period persistence in the sample is very limited moreover turbulence is not smooth but rather occurs by impulses that affect specific industries and it has increased over time overall the pattern of corporate entry and industry development is very indicative of the new opportunities emerging with information and communication technologies this process of open ended continuous transformation supports the case for putting change at the centre of economic analysis

dynamic spillovers among major energy and cereal commodity prices abstract over the past decade the sharp increases in the prices of oil and agricultural commodities have raised serious concerns about the heightened volatility of these markets and the possible negative interactions between them this article deals with the dynamic return and volatility spillovers across international energy and cereal commodity markets it also examines the impacts of three types of opec news announcements on the volatility spillovers and persistence in these markets for this purpose we make use of the var bekk garch and var dcc garch models for the daily spot prices of eight major commodities including wti oil europe brent oil gasoline heating oil barley corn sorghum and wheat our results provide evidence of significant linkages between these energy and cereal markets moreover the opec news announcements are found to exert influence on the oil markets as well as on the oil cereal relationships finally we show that the persistence of volatility decreases increases for the crude oil and heating oil gasoline returns after accounting for the opec announcements in these multivariate garch models however the results are more mixed for the cereal markets overall our results can be used to improve the risk adjusted performance by having more diversified portfolios and also serve to hedge the oil risk more effectively