After the huge rise and fall of agricultural commodity spot and futures prices between 2007 and 2008, the potential reasons for and the impact of the strong rise in volatility provoked an intensive debate in the media as well as in the academic literature. However, owing to the increasing...

Using the farm household as a unit of analysis and farm-level data, this study examines the impact of off-farm income on farmland values. In contrast to previous studies that assume a homogeneous relationship across the entire distribution, in this study quantile regression is used to estimate...

This paper studies the nonlinear adjustment between industrial production and carbon prices – coined as ‘the carbon-macroeconomy relationship’ – in the EU 27. We model carbon price returns and industrial production as nonlinear and state-dependent, with dynamics depending on the sign and...

This paper presents an alternative framework for modeling the behavior of banks in setting lending and/or saving rates. In a short-run dynamic model, we correct for deviations from the long-run path using three feedback coefficients capturing different disequilibria. This enables us to test for...

We examine the use of the random walk hypothesis on the BRICS stock indices. Our examination of the stock indices uses a recently developed wavelet-based unit root test by Fan and Gençay (2010) along with a battery of unit root tests. We also examine the sensitivity of the wavelet-based unit...

The higher moments of a distribution often lead to estimated value-at-risk (VaR) biases. This study's objective is to examine the backtesting of VaR models that consider the higher moments of the distribution for minimum-variance hedging portfolios (MVHPs) of the stock indices and futures in the...

Using the recursive unit root test by Phillips et al. (2011) we show that the Target balances of the German Bundesbank have been explosive from the beginning of 2009 to the beginning of 2013. By implementing a full-allotment policy and reducing the required minimum quality of collaterals in...

In this paper, we use the common structural break test suggested by Bai et al. (1998) to test for a common structural break in the stock prices of the US, the UK, and Japan. On the basis of the structural break, we divide each country's stock price series into sub-samples and investigate whether...

Given its significant policy implications, the nexus between public expenditures and economic growth has been the subject of an extensive and often emotive theoretical and empirical debate. The nexus between two types of public expenditures and economic growth is examined in this paper using...

We examine both in-sample and out-of-sample predictability of South African stock return using macroeconomic variables. We base our analysis on a predictive regression framework, using monthly data covering the in-sample period between 1990:01 and 1996:12, and the out-of sample period commencing...