How much does speculation contribute to oil price volatility? We revisit this contentious question by estimating a sign-restricted structural vector autoregression (SVAR). First, using a simple storage model, we show that revisions to expectations regarding oil market fundamentals and the effect...

We analyse the decline in output volatility in Germany. A lower level of variance in an autoregressive model of output growth can be either due to a change in the structure of the economy (a change in the propagation mechanism) or a reduced error term variance (reduced impulses). In Germany the...

This article tests the Black's hypothesis in five crisis-affected Asian countries (India, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand). The hypothesis posits that economies face a positive relationship between output growth and output volatility. Using monthly data of the industrial production...

In this paper we develop a mixed frequency dynamic factor model featuring stochastic shifts in the volatility of both the latent common factor and the idiosyncratic components. We take a Bayesian perspective and derive a Gibbs sampler to obtain the posterior density of the model parameters. This...

This paper makes a threefold contribution to the underlying dynamic properties and causal effects of energy prices. Firstly, the paper makes a study of the underlying trends to help identify the time series path of nonrenewable energy resources, which can have far reaching consequences for...

The relationships between crude and product prices are crucial throughout oil markets and especially so within the refining industry, where they define the refinery margin between cost of inputs (crudes) and value of outputs (products). The oil market is global but regional factors are also...

The Great Moderation (GM) is widely documented in the literature as one of the most important changes in the US business cycle. All the papers that analyze it use post-WWII data. In this paper, we set the GM for the first time against a long-dated historical backdrop, stretching back a century...

This working paper presents the general theory of the higher order "skew lognormal cascade distribution" as a mathematical extension of the previously proposed skew lognormal cascade distribution. In particular, the second order distribution is studied in details, which incorporates the fat...

How damaging are uncertainty shocks during extreme events such as the great recession and the Covid-19 outbreak? Can monetary policy limit output losses in such situations? We use a nonlinear VAR framework to document the large response of real activity to a financial uncertainty shock during...