The authors of the present paper apply a discrete choice model to determine specific characteristics that influence South African grain farmers’ preferences in hedging against uncertainties. This is the first empirical study conducted in the country regarding such preferences of producers for...

There exists a huge international literature on the, so-called, Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, which in turn, postulates an inverted u-shaped relationship between environmental pollutants and output. The empirical literature on EKC has mainly used test for cointegration, based on...

Given the existence of non-normality and nonlinearity in the data generating process of real house price returns over the period of 1831-2013, this paper compares the ability of various univariate copula models, relative to standard benchmarks (naive and autoregressive models) in forecasting...

The Feldstein-Horioka (FH) puzzle, that is the strong correlation between saving and investment in a world where obstacles to capital mobility are limited, has been studied extensively since it was exposed in 1980. Even though the theoretical and empirical literature has examined many of its...

Information on economic policy uncertainty (EPU) does matter in predicting oil returns especially when accounting for omitted nonlinearities in the relationship between these two variables via a time-varying coefficient approach. In this work, we compare the forecastability of standard, Bayesian...

This paper examines the time series properties of sea level rise and the surface temperature data along the Barrier Coast of Nigeria. In particular, we focus on the seasonality and the degree of persistence of the series, measured in terms of seasonal and non-seasonal unit roots along with...

The objective of this paper is to predict, both in-sample and out-of-sample, the consumer price index (CPI) of the United States (US) economy based on monthly data covering the period of 1980:1-2013:12, using a variety of linear (random walk (RW), autoregressive (AR) and seasonally-adjusted...

This paper investigates the possible existence of Granger-causal relationships in the behavior of sovereign bond markets within the European Monetary Union (EMU), with special focus on higher order causality accounting for nonlinear dependence between the variables. With the above in mind both...

This study reexamines the issue of persistence in carbon emission allowance spot prices, using daily data, and covering the period from 28/2/2007 to 14/05/2014. For this purpose we use techniques based on the concept of long memory accounting for structural breaks and non-linearities in the...

In this paper we examine the real estate returns predictability employing US REITs and a set of possible predictors for the period January 1991 to September 2013. To this end we employ several forecasting models to test for REITs predictability under a flexible framework that captures parameter...