It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...

In this note, we describe the construction of a coincident composite index measuring economic activity in the Finnish economy. We combine information from different sectors of the Finnish economy using a dynamic factor model that permits to extract the business cycle index. The underlying...

A central question in applied research is to estimate the effect of an exogenous intervention or shock on an outcome. The intervention can affect the outcome and controls on impact and over time. Moreover, there can be subsequent feedback between outcomes, controls and the intervention. Many of...

This paper considers whether there were periodically collapsing rational speculative bubbles in commodity prices over a forty year period from the late 1960s. We apply a switching regression approach to a broad range of commodities using two different measures of fundamental values – estimated...

The literature on corporate financing is quite extensive. However, researchers have so far not shed light on the IPO determining factors in Europe as a whole. This paper addresses three main questions observing more than 9000 IPOs performed during a period from 1991 to 2014. First, the...

This paper examines the effect of demand on productivity. We exploit the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as a natural experiment which generated plausibly exogenous variation in the capacity of ethanol plants to establish the causal effect of demand on productivity within the corn sector. Using...

Gorton and Rouwenhorst (2006) examined commodity futures returns over the period July 1959 to December 2004 based on an equally-weighted index. They found that fully collateralized commodity futures had historically offered the same return and Sharpe ratio as U.S. equities, but were negatively...

We develop a cobweb model in which firms, facing a two-period production delay, have access to a flexible (costly) and an inflexible (cheap) production technology. Moreover, firms select between production technologies depending on theirevolutionary fitness, measured in terms of past realized...

For a panel of 75 countries, we find that increases in global agricultural commodity prices that are caused by unfavorable harvest shocks in other regions of the world significantly curtail domestic economic activity. The effects are much larger than for average global agricultural price shifts....

For a panel of 75 countries, we find that increases in global agricultural commodity prices that are caused by unfavorable harvest shocks in other regions of the world significantly curtail domestic economic activity. The effects are much larger than for average global agricultural price shifts....