Frankel and Rose (1997, 1998) state that greater intensity of trading leads to more highly correlated business cycles across countries. Since 2005 Puerto Rico, which belongs to the US currency area, has suffered from economic stagnation. This raises the issue of whether currency areas lead to...

This paper investigates the relationship between the value of the dollar and the prices of two commodities, gold and oil. Granger causality is used on monthly data from January of 1970 through July of 2008. The empirical results show that the hypothesis that there is no causal relation between...

Using the monthly Japanese data from January 1970 to December 2011, this paper analyzes the predictive power of commodity prices and manufactured goods prices for inflation. We split the full sample into the two sub-periods 1970M1-1990M12 and 1991M1-2011M12. By testing the causality at various...

This paper examines the linear and nonlinear causal relationships between commodity price indices and macroeconomic variables such as the consumer price index (CPI) and the industrial production index (IP) in the Euro zone. We use monthly time series data from January 1999 to December 2011 and...

This paper investigates the determinants of the sacrifice ratio in the OECD economies using a quantile regression framework. We show that the relationship is characterised by asymmetries that standard approaches are unable to capture.

This research reviews the effects of fiscal expenditures on economic output in a non-linear fashion for the Barbados economy. Using the Markov-Switching methodology, fiscal expenditure multipliers are estimated for each stage of the business cycle. The data indicates that a three-regime model is...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the output gap and inflation. This study uses a newly proposed flexible data-driven measure of the output gap and finds that such a distance weight-based measure of the ex-ante output gap (WAgap), has a significant and better in-sample relation with...

This paper examines the determinants of international technology diffusion across a sample of 127 countries for the period 1961-2011. We measure technology diffusion by the importation of two capital goods categories that embody different R&D content: computers and metalworking machinery. We...

This study shows that replacing the traditional measure of asymmetry that is skewness in the inflation forecasting model with an alternative asymmetry measure that captures the joint influence of both skewness and variance on inflation significantly improves the forecast at various horizons. The...