The PIGS countries stand in the spotlight of the current financial crisis in Europe. The boom and bust of the real estate sector was one of the major sources putting these countries into an economic downturn. This paper determines the extent to which these countries experienced property bubbles...

A well-known difficulty in estimating conditional moment restrictions is that the parameters of interest need not be globally identified by the implied unconditional moments. In this paper, we propose an approach to constructing a continuum of unconditional moments that can ensure parameter...

Based on the well known Karhunen–Loève expansion, it can be shown that many omnibus tests lack power against “high frequency” alternatives. The smooth tests of  Neyman (1937) may be employed to circumvent this power deficiency problem. Yet, such tests may be difficult to compute in many...

After decades of strong economic growth, industrialization and rising living standards, China has become a dominant player in commodity markets. This study attempts to shed light on the role of China in global commodity price dynamics.

Purpose Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain have been in the spotlight of the recent economic crisis in Europe. With their economy strongly reliant on the construction industry, these countries have become widely exposed to the downturn in the property sector. This paper aims to examine...

To insure a proper and meaningful productivity assessment of DMUs with different production technologies, this article develops a difference-based profit metafrontier Luenberger productivity indicator. Adopting the proposed model, we empirically measure the profit inefficiency and examine the...