The emergence and market success of Linux in recent years has been impressive. Contrary to common belief, commercial enterprises are active only in the provision of services (including distribution) related to Linux. The emergence of this service market has paved the way for Linux to become a...

Methane is a major anthropogenic greenhouse gas, second only to carbon dioxide (CO2) in its impact on climate change. Methane (CH4) has a high global warming potential that is 25 times as large as the one of CO2 on a 100 year time horizon according to the latest IPCC report. Thus, CH4...

This paper evaluates the Morningstar mutual fund ranking system. We find that indeed higher Morningstar ratings are associated with higher returns on the portfolios including respectively five-, four-, three-, two- and one-star funds only (STAR5 to STAR1). We then perform an unconditional and...

The estimation of the costs of conflict is currently receiving a lot of attention in the literature. This paper aims to give a thorough overview of the existing literature, first by addressing the history of case studies that address conflict costs and second by looking at the existing body of...

Energy is an important commodity in many economic activities. Its usage affects the environment via CO2 emissions and the Greenhouse Effect. Modeling the energy-economyenvironment-trade linkages is an important objective in applied economic policy analysis. Previously, however, the modeling of...

In this paper we use a representative consumer model to analyse the equilibrium relation between the transitory deviations from the common trend among consumption, aggregate wealth, and labour income, cay, and focus on the implications for both stock returns and housing returns. The evidence...

Before 2004 South Africa was the dominant steam coal exporter to the European market. However a new market situation with rising global demand and prices makes room for a new entrant: Russia. The hypothesis investigated in this paper is that the three incumbent dominant firms located in South...

In structural vector autoregressive analysis identifying the shocks of interest via heteroskedasticity has become a standard tool. Unfortunately, the approaches currently used for modelling heteroskedasticity all have drawbacks. For instance, assuming known dates for variance changes is often...

Structural identification schemes are of essential importance to vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. This paper tests a commonly used structural parameter identification scheme to assess whether it can properly capture fundamental and non-fundamental shocks to stock prices. In particular, five...

This paper investigates whether there are bubbles in stock prices. We do this using a previously studied structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model claiming to distinguish fundamental and non-fundamental shocks to real stock prices. TheSVAR model relies on an identification restriction in...