This paper uses panel data on life satisfaction of about 40,000 individuals in Germany from 1994 to 2013 to analyze the relationship of subjective well-being and several measures of fuel poverty. We study fuel poverty and its effects on life satisfaction in terms of incidence, intensity and in...

In assessing drivers of commodity prices and volatility at this stage of the current super-cycle in commodities (year 12 of a projected 25), it is vital to understand that production cost is a fundamental. Moreover, marginal production costs are among the most powerful drivers of commodity...

The aim of this article is to study the technology of the sector represented by the Spanish national post-office and telegraph service, Sociedad Estatal Correos y Telégrafos, S.A. trading as Correos, and denominated as such hereafter. Concretely, we analyse economic efficiency (technical and...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the causal linkages between the Spanish electricity, Brent crude oil and Zeebrugge (Belgium) natural gas 1-month-ahead forward prices. Following Lütkepohl et al. (2004), we control for the presence of a structural change in the series and then we use...

Risk neutral densities (RND) can be used to forecast the price of the underlying basis for the option, or it may be used to price other derivates based on the same sequence. The method adopted in this paper to calculate the RND is to firts estimate daily the diffusion process of the underlying...

We estimate the process underlying the pricing of American options by using higher-order lattices combined with a multigrid method. This paper also tests whether the risk-neutral densities given from American options provide a good forecasting tool. We use a nonparametric test of the densities...

We determine optimal monetary policy under commitment in a forwardlooking New Keynesian model when nominal interest rates are bounded below by zero. The lower bound represents an occasionally binding constraint that causes the model and optimal policy to be nonlinear. A calibration to the U.S....

This paper deals with the impact of the $/€ exchange rate on German exports in the period from 1995Q1 to 2008Q4. Our main aim is to identify 'pain thresholds' for German exporters. We rely on a non-linear model according to which suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the EXR...