We study the recent Crimean Crisis and the sequence of outcomes that led to the intervention by the Russian Army, which directly affected equity prices in Russia, to investigate how informed traders may have used their advantage to trade prior to the moment markets fell. We compute the...

This paper introduces a simple methodology to forecast international trade. The main innovation is to calculate non-unitary expenditure elasticities of import demand implied by non-homothetic preferences in the previous year to be further combined with the current change in expenditure to...

Real oil prices surged from 2009 through 2014, comparable to the 1970's oil shock period. Standard explanations based on monopoly markup fall short since inflation remained low after 2009. This paper contributes strong evidence of Granger (1969) predictability of nominal factors to oil prices,...

This article shows how the recovery of inflation in 2009-10 occurred precisely at the only time (since 1985) the models would predict disinflation, i.e., inflation went up when the models said it should go down