on the impacts of oil price fluctuations on european equity markets volatility spillover and hedging effectiveness the objective of this paper is to investigate the volatility spillovers between oil and stock markets in europe as not all industries are expected to be equally affected by oil price changes we conduct our study at both the aggregate as well as sector levels empirically we make use of a recently developed var garch approach which allows for transmissions in volatilities in addition we analyze the optimal weights and hedge ratios for oil stock portfolio holdings based on our results on the whole our findings show significant volatility spillovers between oil price and sector stock returns and suggest that a better understanding of those links is crucial for portfolio management in the presence of oil price risk

mexico and the brady plan mexico has throughout the 1980s been centre stage in the debates and events shaping the sovereign debt problem caught between a sudden collapse of its terms of trade and rising world interest rates mexico suspended debt service payments in august 1982 and ushered in what has since become known as the debt crisis in the following years lending to ldcs dried up and debtor countries were increasingly forced to run high trade surpluses to effect ever growing transfers from poor back to rich countries in the face of falling growth rates and rising inflation in the high debt countries then secretary of the treasury baker proposed the baker plan in return for economic reforms high debt countries would get new access to medium term new loans in addition to rolling over of amortization of old loans new loans had to come both from commercial creditors and the official lending institutions with access to capital markets restored the economic reforms would it was hoped allow the debtors to grow out of debt but experience in the high debt countries showed that the original hopes of the proponents of the baker plan went unfulfilled net transfers out of the borrowing countries went up rather than down as

conditional dependence structure between oil prices and exchange rates a copula garch approach abstract we study the conditional dependence structure between crude oil prices and u s dollar exchange rates using a copula garch approach various copula functions of the elliptical archimedean and quadratic families are used to model the underlying dependence structure in both bearish and bullish market phases over the 2000 2011 period we find evidence of significant and symmetric dependence for almost all the oil exchange rate pairs considered the rise in the price of oil is found to be associated with the depreciation of the dollar moreover we show that student t copulas best capture the extreme dependence and that taking the extreme comovement into account leads to improve the accuracy of var forecasts our main results remain unchanged when considering alternative garch type specifications and the crisis period but are sensitive to the use of raw returns

power illusion in coalitional bargaining an experimental analysis abstract one feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power game theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote distributions and instead only depend on pivotality we conduct an experimental test of the classical baron ferejohn model with five player groups holding real power constant we compare treatments with differences in nominal power we find that initial effects of nominal differences become small or disappear with experience our results also point to the complexity of the environment as having a negative impact on the speed at which this transition takes place finally and of particular importance as a methodological observation giving subjects a pause accelerates learning

new revelations about unemployment persistence in spain time series and panel data approaches using regional data this article aims to re examine the persistence of unemployment in spain for this purpose we use time series and cross section analysis from a time series viewpoint we disaggregate unemployment by regions and use unit root tests ar coefficients and fractional differencing parameters as indicators of persistence for the cross section approach we first estimate mean regressions of regional unemployment rates then using a panel of 114 periods and 50 provinces we estimate pooled fixed and random effects models finally following some recent developments we implement several panel data unit root tests previous studies had already shown the strong persistence of spanish unemployment our disaggregated analysis extends the finding to reveal that the persistence is greater in the most industrialized regions the results also suggest that a structural break took place in 1994 implying a decline in the unemployment persistence since then

production function regressions returns to scale and externalities a number of recent papers have used simple linear regressions in an attempt to identify market structure the extent of returns to scale and possible external effects in u s manufacturing industries the results obtained from these regressions have important implications for several branches of modern macroeconomics as a result the macro literature frequently cites specific numerical evidence from caballero and lyons 1992 and hall 1990 which suggests that there are quantitatively significant increasing returns to scale or external effects in u s manufacturing in contrast it is the argument of this paper that this evidence is not convincing the most robust evidence suggests that the typical u s manufacturing industry displays constant returns with no external effects on the other hand there is significant heterogeneity across industries

does oil move equity prices a global view many studies indicate that oil price shocks have an adverse effect on real output and hence an adverse effect on corporate profits where oil is used as a key input the present study examines whether and to what extent the adverse effect of oil price shocks impacts stock market returns to this end we analyse 35 datastream global industry indices for the period from april 1983 to september 2005 our findings indicate that oil price rises have a negative impact on equity returns for all sectors except mining and oil and gas industries generally these results are consistent with economic theory and evidence provided by previous empirical studies little evidence of any asymmetry is detected in the oil price sensitivities in light of our findings we recommend that international portfolio investors consider hedging oil price risk

are there exploitable inefficiencies in the futures market for oil if the crude oil futures market is not efficient in the fama sense profitable trading opportunities may exist this paper uses an artificial neural network model with moving average crossover inputs to predict price in the crude oil futures market the predictions of price are used to construct buy and sell signals for traders compared to those of benchmark models cumulative returns year to year returns returns over a market cycle and sharpe ratios all favor the ann model by a large factor the significant profitability of the ann model casts doubt on the efficiency of the oil futures market

testing for common features in north american energy markets abstract using recent advances in the field of applied econometrics we explore the strength of shared trends and shared cycles between north american natural gas and crude oil markets in doing so we use daily data from january 1991 to april 2001 on spot u s henry hub natural gas and wti crude oil prices the results show that there has been decoupling of the prices of these two sources of energy as a result of oil and gas deregulation in the united states we also investigate the interconnectedness of north american natural gas markets and find that north american natural gas prices are largely defined by the u s henry hub price trends

measures of technology and the business cycle empirical evidence on the relationship between technology shocks and e g hours worked hinges crucially on the identification of the unobservable technological progress in this paper we study different measures of technology in order to find out i to what extent they capture the same underlying phenomenon and ii whether the implications for macroeconomic theory are robust across the approaches several versions of the productions function approach and structural var models are investigated our main finding is that the different technology measures are highly correlated however the exact formulation of the identifying restrictions seems to matter for the results while we replicate the standard finding of a strongly procyclical solow residual all other measures of technology are either acyclical or countercyclical

bargaining in bicameral legislatures when and why does malapportionment matter malapportionment of seats in bicameral legislatures it is widely argued confers disproportionate benefits to overrepresented jurisdictions ample empirical research has documented that unequal representation produces unequal distribution of government expenditures in bicameral legislatures the theoretical foundations for this empirical pattern are weak it is commonly asserted that this stems from unequal voting power per se using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the closed rule infinite horizon model of baron and ferejohn 1989 we assess the conditions under which unequal representation in a bicameral legislature may lead to unequal division of public expenditures two sets of results are derived first when bills originate in the house and the senate considers the bill under a closed rule the equilibrium expected payoffs of all house members are surprisingly equal second we show that small state biases can emerge when 1 there are supermajority rules in the malapportioned chamber 2 the senate initiates bills which produces maldistributed proposal probabilities and 3 the distributive goods are lumpy we thank seminar participants at new york university the university of pennsylvania and the 2002 annual meeting of the american political science association for helpful comments james snyder and michael ting gratefully acknowledge the financial support of national science foundation grant ses 0079035 stephen ansolabehere gratefully acknowledges the support of the carnegie corporation under the carnegie scholars program this paper was written while michael ting was at the university of north carolina at chapel hill and he thanks the department of political science there for their support

time varying predictability in crude oil markets the case of gcc countries abstract this paper uses a time varying parameter model with generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity effects to examine the dynamic behavior of crude oil prices for the period february 7 1997 january 8 2010 using data from four countries of the gulf cooperation council we find evidence of short term predictability in oil price changes over time except for several short sub periods however the hypothesis of convergence towards weak form informational efficiency is rejected for all markets in addition we explore the possibility of structural breaks in the time paths of the estimated predictability indices and detect only one breakpoint for the oil markets in qatar and the united arab emirates our empirical results therefore call for new empirical research to further gauge the predictability characteristics and the determinants of oil price changes

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

oil prices inflation and interest rates in a structural cointegrated var model for the g 7 countries sharp increases in the price of oil are generally seen as a major contributor to business cycle asymmetries moreover the very recent highs registered in the world oil market are causing concern about possible slowdowns in the economic performance of the most developed countries in this paper a structural cointegrated var model has been considered for the g 7 countries in order to study the direct effects of oil price shocks on output and prices and the reaction of monetary variables to external shocks our results can be summarized as follows i a stationary money demand as suggested by the classic theory of money can be identified for most countries ii according to the estimated coefficients of the structural part of the model for all countries except japan and u k the null hypothesis of an influence of oil prices on the inflation rate cannot be rejected inflation rate shocks are transmitted to the real economy by increasing interest rates iii impulse response analysis suggests for most countries the existence of an instantaneous temporary effect of oil price innovations on prices iv impulse response functions indicate different monetary policy reactions to inflationary and growth shocks v the simulation exercises directed to estimate the total impact of the 1990 oil price shock indicate that for some countries u s a significant part of the effects of the oil price shock is due to the monetary policy reaction function for other countries canada france and italy however the total impact is offset at least in part by an easing of monetary conditions

bargaining in legislatures bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures in our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting the model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard institution free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium

wage bargaining and the phillips curve the identification and specification of aggregate wage equations most economists believe that wage setting is very important for understanding macroeconomic behavior but the form of wage equations commonly estimated suffer from problems of identification the aim of this paper is to consider whether these problems are inevitable and if they are not to suggest ways in whi ch one can estimate structural models of wage setting it is argued that if one confines attention to models of wage bargaining t hat are commonly used identification of the parameters of wage setting should not be a problem and that the most appropriate form of an aggregate wage equation should be a phillips curve copyright 1993 by royal economic society

senate representation and coalition building in distributive politics p7 vhe senate s equal representation of states shapes coalition building in distributive politics the great variation in state population means that some states have far greater need for federal fttnds than others but all senators have equal voting weight as a result even though all senators votes are of equal value to the coalition builder they are not of equal prwice coalition builders can include benefits for small states at considerably less expense to program budgets than comparable benefits for more populous states building on formal models of coalition building two hypotheses are developed and tested first coalition builders will seek out less costly members to build supportive coalitions efficiently second the final outcomes of distributive policy will more closely reflect the preferences of small state senators than large state senators the hypotheses are tested by examining the 1991 and 1997 98 reauthorizations of federal surface transportation programs the findings support both hypotheses

the relevance of supply shocks for inflation the spanish case the methodology applied in this article to the spanish economy is based on ball and mankiw 1995 these authors assume that a good proxy for supply shocks is the third moment of the price changes distribution the main data used are the monthly consumer price indexes of each region disaggregated in 57 categories for the 1993 2005 period we estimate the relation between mean inflation and the higher moments of the distribution including several control variables our results point out that spanish regions show a common pattern with regard to nominal rigidities and that spanish inflation is vulnerable to supply shocks

a trading approach to testing for predictability we propose a market timing test for conditional mean independence of financial returns the new excess predictability ep test statistic has an interpretation of a properly normalized return of a certain trading strategy we discuss similarities of the ep test to the popular directional accuracy da test of pesaran and timmermann power properties of the ep test are advantageous and size properties are comparable to those of the da test we illustrate application of the test using weekly data on the s p500 index

toward efficiency in the crude oil market the official opec prices of crude oil before the collapse in the oil market in the mid 1980s can be interpreted as contract prices and analysed on the basis of the theory of futures or forward markets this paper uses the generalized method of moments estimation technique to test for efficiency in the relationship between the official prices and the ex post spot prices at the time of delivery efficiency is rejected for the sample period 1978 1985 as a whole but evidence is found of improvements over time further the gmm wald and hansen tests although asymptotically equivalent are shown to differ greatly when applied to a small sample of monthly oil price data

price and investment dynamics theory and plant level data we construct a model of a firm competing for market share in a customer market and making investments in physical capital the firm is financially constrained and there are implementation lags in investment our model predicts that product prices should depend on costs and competitors prices but respond weakly to demand shocks also prices should be strongly related to investment we estimate price and investment equations on panel data for swedish manufacturing plants and find results that are qualitatively in line with these predictions though the relation between investment and prices is stronger than predicted by our model

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

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

simulation based tests of forward looking models under var learning dynamics in this paper we propose a simulation based technique to investigate the finite sample performance of likelihood ratio lr tests for the nonlinear restrictions that arise when a class of forward looking fl models typically used in monetary policy analysis is evaluated with vector autoregressive var models we consider one shot tests to evaluate the fl model under the rational expectations hypothesis and sequences of tests obtained under the adaptive learning hypothesis the analysis is based on a comparison between the unrestricted and restricted var likelihoods and the p values associated with the lr test statistics are computed by monte carlo simulation we also address the case where the variables of the fl model can be approximated as non stationary cointegrated processes application to the hybrid new keynesian phillips curve nkpc in the euro area shows that i the forward looking component of inflation dynamics is much larger than the backward looking component and ii the sequence of restrictions implied by the cointegrated nkpc under learning dynamics is not rejected over the monitoring period 1984 2005 copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

on the heterogeneity of sectoral growth and structural dynamics evidence from austrian manufacturing industries this article studies the factors driving structural dynamics across austrian manufacturing industries using a structural vector autoregressive model svar framework we identify sectoral labour productivity and demand shocks that are orthogonal to aggregate shocks we analyse the sectoral impulse response patterns and find that the effect of industry labour productivity shocks on industry output growth is quite heterogeneous we devise a taxonomy that allows us to classify industries according to the effect productivity and demand shocks have on output growth we also show that productivity shocks are quite heterogeneous not just across industries but also over time whereas shocks to sectoral demand growth are more systematic we test the taxonomy in a panel regression and are able to confirm our sector specific findings industry demand shocks and aggregate productivity and demand shocks lead always to an increase in industry output and industry employment

productivity shocks and real exchange rates abstract previous studies have concluded that productivity shocks have negligible effects on real exchange rate fluctuations this paper shows that when long run equilibrium relationships between real exchange rate levels and fundamental variables are taken into account relative productivity shocks account for most of the long run movements in the real exchange rates this can be interpreted as empirical support for the balassa 1964 journal of political economy 72 584 596 and samuelson 1964 review of economics and statistics 46 145 154 model where differences in relative productivity is the main source of long run deviations for purchasing power parity

labor market dynamics and the business cycle structural evidence for the united states we use a 12 dimensional var to examine the aggregate effects of two structural technology shocks and two policy shocks for each shock we examine the dynamic effects on the labor market the importance of the shock for labor market volatility and the comovement between labor market variables and other key aggregate variables in response to the shock we document that labor market indicators display hump shaped responses to the identified shocks technology shocks and monetary policy shocks are important for labor market volatility but the ranking of their importance is sensitive to the var specification the conditional correlations at business cycle frequencies are similar in response to the four shocks apart from the correlations between hours worked labor productivity and real wages to account for the unconditional correlations between these variables a mixture of shocks is required

unemployment dynamics across oecd countries abstract the european community and the us have experienced vastly different unemployment dynamics over the last two decades this paper investigates whether these differences are due to exposure to different shocks or reacting differently to the same shocks with the premise of a search theoretic framework and a structural var methodology the paper robustly identifies aggregate versus reallocative shocks with the exception of spain where most of the dynamics seem to be driven by reallocation it is found that most differences in unemployment dynamics arise because of differences in responses to shocks in particular the us labour market is quicker to adjust than the european community this implies that eec economies might be dynamically sclerotic even if the size of the steady state labour market flows give the impression that european labour markets are quite active various identifying assumptions additional labour supply shocks and different variables are used yet the results appear robust

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations are business cycles mainly the result of permanent shocks to productivity this paper uses a long run restriction implied by a large class of real business cycle models identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trend in output consumption and investment to provide new evidence on this question econometric tests indicate that this common stochastic trend cointegration implication is consistent with postwar u s data however in systems with nominal variables the estimates of this common stochastic trend indicate that permanent productivity shocks typically explain less than half of the business cycle variability in output consumption and investment copyright 1991 by american economic association

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

from labor to finance understanding the failure of socialist economic policies in spain this article seeks to explain the spanish socialist party s psoe s failure to reverse spain s dismal employment record during the course of its long government tenure from 1982 until 1996 most efforts to explain spain s position at the extreme of the unemployment spectrum in europe follow the prevalent tendency in the comparative political economy literature by giving causal primacy to labor market institutions this article challenges this labor market centered view by arguing that the failure of the socialist government s economic policy strategy is to be found in the interaction of two other factors the biased course of financial liberalization and the perverse effects of the psoe s macroeconomic policy strategy on inflation and on the process of social concertation national wage bargaining the article also seeks to explain the psoe s choices in these policy areas

on the short and long run efficiency of energy and precious metal markets this article contributes to the related literature by empirically investigating the efficiency of nine energy and precious metal markets over the last decades employing several pronounced models we test for both short and the long run efficiency using in addition to linear cointegration models nonlinear cointegration and error correction models ecms which allow the efficiency intensity to change per regime our findings can be summarized as follows i futures prices are found to be cointegrated with spot prices but they do not constitute unbiased predictors of future spot prices ii the hypothesis of risk neutrality is rejected iii the short run efficiency hypothesis is rejected suggesting that using past futures price returns improves the modeling and forecasting of future spot prices and iv the nonlinear modeling suggests the presence of two distinct regimes wherein the first regime the efficiency hypothesis is supported whereas in the second it is rejected the empirical findings have important implications for producers hedgers speculators and policymakers

testing for market timing ability abstract in this paper we examine the henriksson merton test of market timing and its potential usefulness in evaluating investment advice the paper proposes a natural extension of the test that is valid under more general assumptions about the distribution of asset returns we show that the henriksson merton test and its more general counterpart are special cases of standard tests of market rationality and efficiency both tests are applied to a group of foreign exchange advisory services

structural unemployment spain versus portugal the increase in european unemployment over the last two decades has made clear that the natural rate of unemployment is all but natural and all but constant a considerable body of research has explored the determinants of what is now and more appropriately called the structural rate of unemployment much of this research was summarized in the book by richard layard et al 1991 this year has seen two new and important contributions an in depth empirical study by the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd 1994 and a theoretical exploration by edmund phelps 1994 how much closer are we to understanding the differences in structural rates across countries and their movements over time to answer those questions we decided to take up what may be the biggest empirical challenge facing theories of structural unemployment the dramatic difference in the unemployment experiences of portugal and spain both countries have had a remarkably similar history over the last 20 years yet one spain has the highest unemployment rate in the european union 24 4 percent while the other portugal has save for luxembourg the lowest one 6 8 percent this paper presents our conclusions a short summary is that humility and more research are in order

spanish industrial unemployment some explanatory factors the high level of unemployment is probably the worst feature of the recent evolution of the spanish economy in 1970 the overall unemployment rate stood at 1 per cent of the civilian labour force in 1984 it is estimated to have gone over the 20 per cent level this is a substantial increase which has no parallel in any european country between 1970 and 1983 the average unemployment rate in the eec rose by 8 6 percentage points while the increase in spain over the same period was of 17 points there is wide agreement among spanish economists that these figures may be overstating the actual extent of the problem the incidence of the underground economy and of fraudulent practices in unemployment registration may be wider than in most eec countries nevertheless we believe that even taking into account these measurement difficulties there has been a genuine worsening of the employment situation in spain relative to that in other western economies the purpose of this paper is to review the evidence of the last 20 years about the main variables that influence the spanish labour market and to attempt a preliminary explanation of the increase in unemployment for the latter task we use the analytical framework recently developed by layard and nickell 1984a and concentrate on those institutional factors that may have influenced the level of unemployment consistent with non accelerating inflation nairu the next section of the paper describes the key facts that we are trying to explain section ii presents the analytical framework that we use and discusses its theoretical foundations these are dealt with very briefly since they are fully explained in layard and nickell 1984a here we concentrate mostly on the empirical specification and on the description of the variables the econometric results are presented in section iii and the explanation of the unemployment increase is given in section iv the final section summarizes our findings

are us stock index returns predictable evidence from automatic autocorrelation based tests this article re examines the evidence of return predictability for three major us stock indices using two recently developed data driven tests namely the automatic portmanteau box pierce test and the wild bootstrapped automatic variance ratio test in tracking the time variation of return predictability via rolling estimation window we find that those periods with significant return autocorrelations can largely be associated with major exogenous events theoretically the documented time varying nature of predictable patterns is consistent with the adaptive markets hypothesis

legislative bargaining under weighted voting organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting we analyze this setting using a non cooperative bargaining game based on the baron ferejohn 1989 model unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory we find that each voter s expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight an exception occurs when many high weight voters exist as low weight voters may expect disproportionately high payoffs due to proposal power the model also predicts that ex post the coalition formateur the party chosen to form a coalition will receive a disproportionately high payoff using data from coalition governments from 1946 to 2001 we find strong evidence ofsuch formateur effects

how do opec news and structural breaks impact returns and volatility in crude oil markets further evidence from a long memory process abstract since its formation opec through its conference decisions has been a major player in the world oil markets the purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of opec s different news announcements on the conditional expectations and volatility of crude oil markets in the presence of long memory and structural changes to do so we first discern opec s oil production behavior in response to its cut maintain and increase decisions then by applying the arma garch class models to the two global benchmarks wti and brent over the period may 1987 through december 2012 we find strong evidence of long memory the empirical evidence also shows that opec s announcements especially the cut and the maintain decisions have a significant effect on both returns and volatility of the crude oil markets particularly that of the wti moreover we explore the possibility of structural breaks in the crude oil prices and detect five six breakpoints for the wti brent oil markets the presence of structural breaks reduces the persistence of volatility accounting for opec s scheduled news announcements in the presence of structural changes reduces the degree of volatility persistence and enhances the understanding of this volatility in the oil markets these results have several implications for policy makers oil traders and other participants in the crude oil markets

the consequences of the us doj s antitrust activities a macroeconomic perspective do the antitrust law enforcement activities of the us department of justice act as exogenous technology shocks or as markup shocks limiting market power and promoting economic growth we analyze annual time series data from 1947 to 2003 on three measures of federal antitrust intervention the ratio of the antitrust division s budgetary expenditures to gdp as well as the numbers of civil and criminal antitrust cases instituted we find that changes in the levels of these policy variables act like negative technology shocks and that the negative effects are transitory antitrust policy generates no subsequent offsetting increases in productivity

luck versus forecast ability determinants of trader performance in futures markets statistical techniques are used to demonstrate that the fortunes of individual futures traders are determined by luck not forecast ability even though a large number of traders appear to exhibit significantly superior forecast ability the investigation strongly supports three conclusions there are fewer participants with significantly superior skill than expected if participants trade randomly there are more traders exhibiting no skill than expected if participants trade randomly and forecast ability is not correlated over time superior forecasters in the early period are only average forecasters in the later period therefore it is luck that determines trader performance copyright 1991 by university of chicago press

are the crude oil markets becoming weakly efficient over time a test for time varying long range dependence in prices and volatility this paper analyzes the efficiency of crude oil markets brent and west texas intermediate by means of estimating the fractal structure of these time series we test for time varying degrees of long range dependence using the rescaled range hurst analysis and find evidence that this market has become more efficient over time these results are robust for controlling for short term autocorrelation by means of a shuffling procedure

production growth and business cycles ii new directions abstract this paper outlines new directions for investigations of real business cycle models consideration of stochastic growth of exogenous and endogenous forms analysis of suboptimal outcomes arising due to externalities of distorting taxes and implications of labor market heterogeneity

the relation between price and marginal cost in u s industry an examination of data on output and labor input reveals that some u s industries have marginal cost well below price the conclusion rests on the finding that cyclical variations in labor input are small compared with variations in output in booms firms produce substantially more output and sell it for a price that exceeds the costs of the added inputs the paper documents the disparity between price and marginal cost where marginal cost is estimated from annual variations in cost it considers a variety of explanations of the findings that are consistent with competition but none is found to be completely plausible

how well does the is lm model fit postwar u s data postwar u s time series for money interest rates prices and gnp are characterized by a multivariate process driven by four exogenous disturbances those disturbances are identified so that they can be interpreted as the four main sources of fluctuations found in the is lm phillips curve model money supply money demand is and aggregate supply shocks the dynamic properties of the estimated model are analyzed and shown to match most of the stylized predictions of the model the estimated decomposition is also used to measure the relative importance of each shock to interpret some macroeconomic episodes and to study sources of permanent shocks to nominal variables

legislative representation bargaining power and the distribution of federal funds evidence from the us congress this article investigates the relationship between representation in legislatures and the geographic distribution of federal funds in a legislative bargaining model we demonstrate that funds are concentrated in high representation areas and two channels underlie this result the proposal power channel reflects the role of representation in committee assignments and the vote cost channel reflects the role of representation in coalition formation in our empirical analysis we find that small states relative to large states receive more funding in the us senate relative to the house we also find empirical support for the two channels underlying this relationship throughout the history of federations and international organisations a key consti tutional design question involves how jurisdictions of different sizes are represented in legislative bodies and how their votes will ultimately be weighted large jurisdictions typically argue for delegation sizes or voting weights that are roughly proportional to population whereas small jurisdictions typically argue for an equal number of delegates or votes for each jurisdiction this conflict over representation is presumably driven at least in part by a belief that increased representation strengthens bargaining power in the battle over the geographic distribution of funds authorised by these legislative bodies in this article i analyse the relationship between legislative representation bar gaining power and the geographic distribution of federal funds from both a theoretical and empirical perspective in addition to investigating the existence of a relationship between representation and federal funds i also explore the underlying mechanisms that is i ask which political institutions such as agenda control provided to commit tees and the formation of coalitions under majority rule shape the bargaining power of jurisdictions in central legislatures and thus facilitate the relationship between repre sentation and the distribution of federal spending to provide a framework for analysing these issues i begin by developing a simple theoretical model of a central legislature that determines the crossjurisdiction distri bution of local public goods which are financed by a national tax base both delegation sizes and population are variable allowing me to consider a variety of institutional arrangements for jurisdictional representation legislators represent local interests and given the common pool problem associated with concentrated benefits and dis persed tax costs attempt to increase ownjurisdiction spending but to restrain spending elsewhere the model follows a recent literature on legislative bargaining in which a proposer must secure a majority of votes in order to pass legislation and due to the

examining the first stages of market performance a test for evolving market efficiency abstract a new test of whether markets evolve through detecting changes in weak form efficiency is proposed the test is evaluated through monte carlo simulations empirical examples are provided for both developed and emerging markets

measuring core inflation in this paper we argue that measured rpi inflation is conceptually mismatched with core inflation the difference is more than just measurement error we propose a technique for measuring core inflation based on an explicit long run economic hypothesis core inflation is defined as that component of measured inflation that has no medium to long run impact on real output a notion that is consistent with the vertical long run phillips curve interpretation of the co movement in inflation and output we construct a measure of core inflation by placing dynamic restrictions on a vector autoregression var system

production function residuals var technology shocks and hours worked evidence from industry data using disaggregate u s industry data we analyze three different production function residuals and the technology shocks obtained from the gali gali j 1999 technology employment and the business cycle do technology shocks explain aggregate fluctuations american economic review 89 249 271 structural var model the different methods produce technology shocks that are highly correlated and negatively related to hours worked

productivity shocks and real business cycles abstract productivity shocks play a central role in real business cycles as an exogenous impulse to macroeconomic activity however measured solow prescott residuals do not behave as an exogenous impulse rather econometric evidence provided in this paper indicates that 1 money interest rates and government spending granger cause these impulses and 2 a substantial component of the variance of these impulses between one quarter and one half is attributable to variations in aggregate demand these results are robust to a number of econometric issues including measurement errors specification of the production function and certain forms of omitted real variables

the impact of energy derivatives on the crude oil market we examine the effects of energy derivatives trading on the crude oil market there is a common public and regulatory perception that derivative securities increase volatility and can have a destabilizing effect on the underlying market consistent with this view we find an abnormal increase in volatility for three consecutive weeks following the introduction of nymex crude oil futures while there is also evidence of a longer term volatility increase this is likely due to exogenous factors such as the continuing deregulation of the energy markets subsequent introductions of crude oil options and derivatives on other energy commodities have no effect on crude oil volatility we also examine the effects of derivatives trading on the depth and liquidity of the crude oil market this analysis reveals a strong inverse relation between the open interest in crude oil futures and spot market volatility specifically when open interest is greater the volatility shock associated with a given unexpected increase in volume is much smaller

u s equity and commodity futures markets hedging or financialization abstract in this paper we investigate the hedging versus the financialization nature of commodity futures vis a vis the equity market using a arma filter based correlation approach our results suggest that while gold futures are typically seen as a hedge against unfavorable fluctuations in the stock market the majority of commodity futures appears to be treated as a separate asset class in line with their increasing financialization our results are robust to the presence of inflation highlight the hedging role played by fuel energy commodity futures in the nineties and reveal that the commodity financialization boosted since the 2000s we also show that gold futures are partially a safe haven for equity investments in the short term but not in the mid term finally we uncover some hedging financialization of crude oil futures associated to global demand oil supply shocks

oil price fluctuation volatility spillover and the ghanaian equity market implication for portfolio management and hedging effectiveness abstract this study attempts to contribute to the literature on stock markets and energy prices by examining the dynamic volatility and volatility transmission between oil and ghanaian stock market returns in a multivariate setting using the recently developed var garch var agarch and dcc garch frameworks in turn the models results are used to compute and analyze the optimal weights and hedge ratios for oil stock portfolio holdings for comparison purposes and to put the paper more in the perspective of west africa the nigerian stock market is also included in the analysis our findings point to the existence of significant volatility spillover and interdependence between oil and the two stock market returns while spillover effects are stronger for nigeria the transmission of volatility is much more apparent from oil to stock than from stock to oil in the case of ghana also the study demonstrates evidence of short term predictability in oil and stock price changes through time and reveals that conditional volatility changes more rapidly as result of substantial effects of past volatility rather than past news shocks for all market returns moreover we show that there is a slightly more effective hedge in the two stock markets under the dcc garch framework our preferred model compared to the other two models although hedging effectiveness is much greater for ghana on the whole our findings for optimal hedge ratios are consistent with other studies and particularly the view that oil assets should be an integral part of a diversified portfolio of stocks and suggest that a better understanding of volatility links is crucial for portfolio management in the presence of oil price risk finally the existence of multivariate asymmetric effects and dynamic conditional correlations as revealed by the var agarch and dcc garch models make it clear that the assumptions of symmetric effects and constant conditional correlations are not supported empirically

behavioral identification in coalitional bargaining an experimental analysis of demand bargaining and alternating offers alternating offer and demand bargaining models of legislative bargaining make very different predictions in terms of both ex ante and ex post distribution of payoffs as well as in the role of the order of play the experiment shows that actual bargaining behavior is not as sensitive to the different bargaining rules as the theoretical point predictions whereas the comparative statics are in line with both models we compare our results to studies that attempt to distinguish between these two approaches using field data finding strong similarities between the laboratory and field data regardless of the underlying bargaining process

testing the evolution of crude oil market efficiency data have the conn utilising a time varying gar 1 tgarch 1 1 model with different frequency data we investigate the weak form efficiency of major global crude oil spot markets in europe the us the uae and china for the period from december 2001 to august 2013 our empirical results with weekly data indicate that all four markets have reached efficiency with few brief inefficient periods during the past decade whereas the daily crude oil returns series suggest intermittent and inconsistent efficiency we argue that the weekly friday series fit the data better than the average series in autocorrelation tests the evidence suggests that all four markets exhibit asymmetries in return volatility reactions to different information shocks and that they react more strongly to bad news than to good news the 2008 financial crisis has significantly affected the efficiency of oil markets furthermore a comovement phenomenon and volatility spillover effects exist among the oil markets policy recommendations consistent with our empirical results are proposed which address three issues implementing prudential regulations establishing an asian pricing centre and improving transparency in crude oil spot markets

monitoring structural change in dynamic econometric models the classical approach to testing for structural change employs retrospective tests using a historical data set of a given length here we consider a wide array of fluctuation type tests in a monitoring situation given a history period for which a regression relationship is known to be stable we test whether incoming data are consistent with the previously established relationship procedures based on estimates of the regression coefficients are extended in three directions we introduce a procedures based on ols residuals b rescaled statistics and c alternative asymptotic boundaries compared to the existing tests our extensions offer better power against certain alternatives improved size in finite samples for dynamic models and ease of computation respectively we apply our methods to two data sets german m1 money demand and u s labor productivity

the new keynesian phillips curve and staggered price and wage determination in a model with firm specific labor we develop a dsge model with rm speci c labor where rm level wage bargaining and price setting are subject to calvo type staggering this is in general an intractable problem due to complicated intertemporal dependencies between price and wage decisions however the problem is signi cantly simpli ed if we in line with empirical evidence assume that prices can be changed whenever wages are we show that the price and wage setting relationships are substantially altered by the introduction of rm speci c labor speci cally the in ation response is substantially dampened whereas the wage in ation response is increased as compared to models with freely mobile labor these distinctive features of the model with rm speci c labor is supported by empirical evidence from a structural var

time varying long range dependence in energy futures markets abstract this study aims to investigate the presence of long range dependence in energy futures markets using a daily dataset covering from 1990 to 2013 which includes crucial events for energy markets such as invasion of iraq and global financial crisis of 2008 we estimate time varying generalized hurst exponents of several energy futures contracts with different times to maturity using a rolling window approach results reveal that efficiency of energy futures markets is clearly time varying and changes drastically over the sample period for futures contracts with 1 4 months to maturities crude oil and gasoline are found to be more efficient compared to others on the other hand for contracts with 5 9 months to maturities crude oil and natural gas futures are more efficient for almost every different month to maturity heating oil and gas oil futures are found to be the least efficient markets moreover in general the efficiency of energy futures markets is found to be decreasing dramatically when time to maturity is increasing several implications are discussed

malapportionment and multilateral bargaining an experiment abstract members of collective decision making bodies often represent communities that differ in population sizes malapportionment results when decision making power is not allocated evenly across the population two well known institutions with malapportionment have emerged bicameralism and weighted voting this paper studies experimentally how agenda setting power affects the distribution of resources comparing across those two institutions conventional wisdom suggests that malapportionment favors scarcely populated states i find that this is the case under weighted voting but not necessarily in a bicameral system in the later case the allocation of agenda setting power can be used to eliminate distortions stemming from malapportionment

nonparametric retrospection and monitoring of predictability of financial returns we develop and evaluate sequential testing tools for a class of nonparametric tests for predictability of financial returns that include in particular the directional accuracy and excess profitability tests our sequential methods consider in a unified framework both retrospection of a historical sample and monitoring newly arriving data to this end we focus on linear monitoring boundaries that are continuations of horizontal lines corresponding to retrospective critical values elaborating on both two sided and one sided testing we run a simulation study and illustrate the methodology by testing for directional and mean predictability of returns in young stock markets in eastern europe

unit root properties of crude oil spot and futures prices in this article we examine whether wti and brent crude oil spot and futures prices at 1 3 and 6 months to maturity contain a unit root with one and two structural breaks employing weekly data over the period 1991 2004 to realise this objective we employ lagrange multiplier lm unit root tests with one and two endogenous structural breaks proposed by lee and strazicich 2003 minimum lagrange multiplier unit root test with two structural breaks review of economics and statistics 85 1082 1089 2004 minimum lm unit root test with one structural break working paper no 04 17 department of economics appalachian state university we find that each of the oil price series can be characterised as a random walk process and that the endogenous structural breaks are significant and meaningful in terms of events that have impacted on world oil markets

oil prices and economic activity an asymmetric cointegration approach the aim of this paper is to study the long term relationship between oil prices and economic activity proxied by gdp to account for asymmetries existing in the links between the two variables we propose an approach based on asymmetric cointegration our empirical analysis concerns the u s economy but also the g7 europe and euro area economies results indicate that while standard cointegration is rejected there is evidence for asymmetric cointegration between oil prices and gdp

multinational companies technology spillovers and plant survival how does the presence of multinational companies affect plant survival in the host country we postulate that multinational companies can impact positively on plant survival through technology spillovers we examine the nature of the effect of multinationals using a cox proportional hazard model which we estimate using plant level data for irish manufacturing industries our results show that the presence of multinationals has a life enhancing effect only on indigenous plants in high tech industries suggesting the presence of technology spillovers in contrast multinationals compete with each other in low tech sectors in the host country

technology shocks and the labor input response evidence from firm level data we study the relationship between technology shocks and labor input on swedish firm level data using a production function approach to identify technology shocks taking standard steps yields a contractionary contemporaneous labor input response in tine with previous studies this finding may however be driven by measurement errors in the labor input variable relying on a unique feature of our data set which contains two independently measured firm specific labor input measures we can evaluate the potential bias we do not find that this bias conceals any true positive contemporaneous effect the results thus point away from standard flexible price models and toward models emphasizing firm level rigidities

the causes of spanish unemployment a structural var approach abstract in this paper we review the main causes of spanish unemployment and weight them by estimating a simple macroeconomic model using the structural var methodology by using this methodology we associate different causes of unemployment with shocks of different nature which have long lasting effects due to full hysteresis we claim that such an extreme assumption on state dependency is reasonable at least as a local approximation for the period and the economy at hand our results suggest that the combination of a plausible mixture of different types of shock and extreme persistence in their propagation mechanisms can satisfactorily explain the dismal performance of the spanish labour market during the last two decades

communication in multilateral bargaining one of the most robust phenomena in the experimental literature on multilateral bargaining is the failure of proposers to extract equilibrium rents however all previous experiments have overlooked the fact that outside the lab committee members are allowed to and do engage in sometimes intense communication processes prior to voting on a proposal we conduct an experimental test of the baron ferejohn model in which we allow committee members to engage in unrestricted cheap talk communication before a proposal is submitted we find that proposers extract a significantly higher share of resources when communication is allowed communication increases proposer power through two channels first it mitigates the uncertainty surrounding the amount a coalition member is willing to accept second it allows potential coalition members to compete for a place in the coalition by lowering this stated price

efficiency of crude oil markets evidences from informational entropy analysis abstract the role of crude oil as the main energy source for the global economic activity has motivated the discussion about the dynamics and causes of crude oil price changes an accurate understanding of the issue should provide important guidelines for the design of optimal policies and government budget planning using daily data for wti over the period january 1986 march 2011 we analyze the evolution of the informational complexity and efficiency for the crude oil market through multiscale entropy analysis the results indicated that the crude oil market is informationally efficient over the scrutinized period except for two periods that correspond to the early 1990s and late 2000s us recessions overall the results showed that deregulation has improved the operation of the market in the sense of making returns less predictable on the other hand there is some evidence that the probability of having a severe us economic recession increases as the informational efficiency decreases which indicates that returns from crude oil markets are less uncertain during economic downturns