Existing indices measuring the spatial distribution of economic activity such as the Krugman Specialisation Index, the Hirschmann-Herfindahl index and the Ellison-Glaeser index typically do not take into account the spatial structure of the data. In this paper, we first consider traditional...

Economists increasingly pay attention to social capital as an important determinant of macroeconomic growth performance. At the same time, there is discussion regarding the robustness of the results of empirical growth studies. In a seminal paper, Knack and Keefer (1997) assess the effect of...

The paper considers the problem as to whether financial returns have a common volatility process in the framework of stochastic volatility models that were suggested by Harvey et al. (1994). We propose a stochastic volatility version of the ARCH test proposed by Engle and Susmel (1993), who...

Modelling covariance structures is known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In order to avoid this problem for forecasting, the authors propose a new factor multivariate stochastic volatility (fMSV) model for realized covariance measures that accommodates asymmetry and long memory....

One of the most popular univariate asymmetric conditional volatility models is the exponential GARCH (or EGARCH) specification. In addition to asymmetry, which captures the different effects on conditional volatility of positive and negative effects of equal magnitude, EGARCH can also...

Of the two most widely estimated univariate asymmetric conditional volatility models, the exponential GARCH (or EGARCH) specification can capture asymmetry, which refers to the different effects on conditional volatility of positive and negative effects of equal magnitude, and leverage, which...

Of the two most widely estimated univariate asymmetric conditional volatility models, the exponential GARCH (or EGARCH) specification can capture asymmetry, which refers to the different effects on conditional volatility of positive and negative effects of equal magnitude, and leverage, which...

This paper features an analysis of the cointegration relationships among agricultural commodity, ethanol and Cushing crude oil spot and futures prices. The use of grains for the creation of bio-fuels has sparked fears that these demands are inflating food prices. We analyse approximately 10...