The dating of cyclical phenomena in economies, such as business cycles, is at the core of economic policy research. Moreover, policy decisions which are due to affect interacting economies should take into account the economies' connectedness and synchronicity. The cross-country analysis of...

The overall degree of international equity market connectedness has gradually increased over the past two decades. Reflecting the shift in global economic power, it has been recently suggested to pay more attention to the BRICT (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Turkey) countries. Building on,...

The main objective of our study is to model and forecast volatility as measured by the VIX index, with the aim of producing information to banks and also to macroeconomists. We begin with Arma/Arima models, augmented with Garch errors and exogenous regressors : some macroeconomic leading...

Combating climate change and other environmental problems are among the main challenges of the current century. As a consequence, researchers as well as policymakers are discussing worldwide how regulative interventions should be designed to cope with these tasks. From an economic perspective,...

We generalize the concept of the natural rate of interest (Laubach i Williams, 2003; Woodford, 2003) by defining and estimating the the natural yield curve (NYC) - the term structure of natural interest rates. Our motivation stems i.a. from the observation that at times when central banks attempt to...

he Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts global sea level to rise (SLR) by up to 60 cm by 2100 in response to ocean warming and glaciers melting. Moreover, it is expected that sea level rise might be of 1 meter or more in 2100 due to recent...

Several times a year, OPEC hosts conferences with its members to review oil fundamentals and decide on production quota adjustments. The organization meets behind closed doors, but the opening meeting is open to the press and usually fuels market speculation on which agreement concerning oil...