The financial crisis has fueled interest in alternatives to traditional asset classes that might be less affected by large market gyrations and, thus, provide for a less volatile development of a portfolio. One attempt at selecting stocks that are less prone to extreme risks, is obeyance of...

Recent empirical evidence on the direct link of inflation targeting and inflation volatility is at best mixed. However, comparing inflation volatility across alternative monetary policy regimes within a country based on conventional ways, used in previous studies, begs the question. The question...

Motivated by financial liberalization investors seek for new investment opportunities through international portfolio diversification. To this end we explore any asymmetric causal relationship between developed European stock markets (German, France and U.K) and emerging Baltic markets namely;...

We study the directional accuracy of South African survey data of short-term and longer-term inflation forecasts. Upon applying techniques developed for the study of relative operating characteristic (ROC) curves, we find evidence that forecasts contain information with respect to the subsequent...

The paper assesses the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, across 48 contiguous states of the US, using recent advances in panel data techniques, given the existence of cross-sectional dependence, which in turn, makes reliance on time-series evidence biased. The Common...

One characteristic of many macroeconomic and financial time series is their asymmetric behaviour during different phases of a business cycle. Oil price shocks have been amongst those economic variables that have been identified in theoretical and empirical literature to predict the phases of...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between tourism activity and economic performance for G-7 countries. This paper attempts to answer two questions. Firstly, it will look at whether economic growth causes increased tourism activity for Italy, Canada, Japan, France, the UK, the...

The recent commodity price boom has spurred interest to understand determinants of commodity price movements. This paper investigates the causal relationship between oil prices and the prices of 25 other commodities, which include both metals and agricultural products, in the presence of...

This study applies the recently developed bootstrap panel causality test proposed by Kónya (2006) to investigate the causal link between happiness and smoking using per capita cigarette consumption and happiness index for 5 countries (i.e. Japan, France, Germany, the UK, and the US) over the...

This paper presents an analysis of ethanol-gasoline price ratio in Brazil from 2000 to 2012. Since 2008 Brazilian Government has artificially frozen gasoline prices while prices of ethanol to the consumer were still liberated. Considering that annual inflation in Brazil is around 5% per year and...