In a cointegrated VAR model we examined the relationship between oil price and macroeconomy in Iran, which is the third largest oil exporter in the world. The sample is quarterly data, ranging from 1994:1 to 2007:4. We find that an increase in real oil prices by 1% is associated with a 0.30%...

A controversial view of the evolution of commodity markets is that the engagement of speculative capital arguably introduces volatility and price movements unrelated to changes in traditional demand and supply factors. Thus, the efficiency of spot and futures markets is an important topic in...

Recent papers by Chen et al (2009, 2010) suggest that exchange rates have predictive power over future commodity price movements. We use a Vector Error-Correction model to test this hypothesis using Australian data. We find substantial evidence of in-sample forecasting power but are unable to...

The objective of this paper is to identify the relationship between sovereign yield spreads and macroeconomic variables in emerging markets. We find that the correlation between spreads and GDP is negative. Real effective exchange rate depreciation enlarges spreads and increasing in risk...

The tax smoothing hypothesis (TSH) is tested for the New Member States of the European Union. Our results show that the TSH holds for five countries, the introduction of the Maastricht 3%-deficit rule, however, had very little effect with regard to the validity of the TSH.