The paper studies the effect of High Yielding Variety (HYV) of seeds on agricultural yield for the state of West Bengal and, in turn, goes ahead and prepares a postmortem of why, if so, the Òmiracle seedsÓ failed to deliver in West Bengal, as is so often claimed. The results indicate that the...

This paper empirically examines the effect of house price changes on economic growth across provinces in South Africa. The economic impact of house prices is estimated using a panel data set that covers all nine provinces in South Africa from 1996 to 2010. We find that when heterogeneity,...

While there is a large body of literature on oil uncertainty-equity prices and/or returns nexus, an associated important question of how oil market uncertainty affects stock market bubbles remains unanswered. In this paper, we first use the Multi-Scale Log-Periodic Power Law Singularity...

This paper examines the role of financial development on U.S. state-level income inequality in the 50 states from 1976 to 2011, using fixed-effect estimation. We find robust results whereby financial development linearly increases income inequality for the 50 states. When we divide 50 states...

This paper provides a long-term perspective to the causal linkages between currency dynamics and macroeconomic conditions by utilising a long span data set for the United Kingdom that extends back to 1856 and a time-varying causality testing methodology that accounts for the nonlinearity and...

We extend our understanding on the role of wine investment within a portfolio of different assets (US/UK equities, bonds, gold, and housing) by considering a rich methodology based, among others, on the mean-variance and stochastic-dominance approaches. The main findings suggest that wine is the...

The paper assesses the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, across 48 contiguous states of the US, using recent advances in panel data techniques, given the existence of cross-sectional dependence, which in turn, makes reliance on time-series evidence biased. The Common...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between tourism activity and economic performance for G-7 countries. This paper attempts to answer two questions. Firstly, it will look at whether economic growth causes increased tourism activity for Italy, Canada, Japan, France, the UK, the...

This study applies the recently developed bootstrap panel causality test proposed by Kónya (2006) to investigate the causal link between happiness and smoking using per capita cigarette consumption and happiness index for 5 countries (i.e. Japan, France, Germany, the UK, and the US) over the...

This paper analyses the empirical relationship between inflation and growth using a panel data estimation technique, Multiple Regime Panel Smooth Transition Regression (MR-PSTR), which takes into account the nonlinearities in the data. By using a panel data set for 10 African countries that...