Over the past two decades, the Black Sea region has exhibited significantly growing wheat production and exports. In 2017/18, Russia ultimately became the world’s largest wheat exporter, a position that was held by the USA for decades. Mostly serving destination markets in the Middle East and...

It is generally believed that excessive stock market volatility reflects non-mathematical market expectations that are driven by “irrational exuberance” or “animal spirits”. As shown in this paper, there is an alternative explanation. If ex-ante and ex-post expectations are calculated in...

Adding multivariate stochastic volatility of a flexible form to large Vector Autoregressions (VARs) involving over a hundred variables has proved challenging due to computational considerations and over-parameterization concerns. The existing literature either works with homoskedastic models or...