A stable government is by definition not dominated by any other government. However, it may happen that all governments are dominated. In graph-theoretic terms this means that the dominance graph does not possess a source. In this paper we are able to deal with this case by a clever combination...

This paper analyses futures prices for four energy commodities (light sweet crude oil, heating oil, gasoline and natural gas) and five agricultural commodities (corn, oats, soybean oil, soybeans and wheat), over the period 1986-2010. Using CCC and DCC multivariate GARCH models, we find that...

This paper analyses the forecasting power of weekly futures prices at Nord Pool. The forecasting power of futures prices is compared to an ARIMAX model of the spot price. The time series model contains lagged external variables such as: temperature, precipitation, reservoir levels and the basis...

This paper evaluates how different types of speculation affect the volatility of commodities’ futures prices. We adopt four indexes of speculation: Working’s T, the market share of non-commercial traders, the percentage of net long speculators over total open interest in future markets,...

One of the main reasons why workers’ enterprises (WE) still represent a relevant chunk of the economy may lie in some affinities with conventional profit maximizing firms. To prove this, we compare the entry policies of WEs and conventional firms when they can decide size at entry while having...

This paper examines the effect of competition on the irreversible investment decisions under uncertainty as a generalization of the “real option” approach. We examine this issue with reference to an industry where each firm has only one investment opportunity which is completely irreversible...

In this paper we discuss a simple econometric strategy for pricing and hedging illiquid financial products, such as the Japanese crude oil cocktail (JCC) index, the most popular OTC energy derivative in Japan. First, we review the existing literature for computing optimal hedge ratios (OHR) and...

The identification of the forces that drive stock returns and the dynamics of their associated volatilities is a major concern in empirical economics and finance. This analysis is particularly relevant for determining optimal hedging strategies based on whether shocks to the volatilities of...

We study uniform price auctions using a dataset which includes individual bidders' demand schedules in Finnish Treasury auctions during the period 1992-99. Average underpricing amounts to .041% of face value. Theory suggests that underpricing may result from monopsonistic market power. We...