We investigate the role of crude oil spot and futures prices in the process of price discovery by using a cost-of-carry model with an endogenous convenience yield and daily data over the period from January 1990 to December 2008. We provide evidence that futures markets play a more important...

This paper attempts to investigate the main factors behind Argentina’s economic decline comparing its evolution to that of Australia and Canada. With this objective, we have constructed a reduced index of economic freedom which captures and summarises the main political macroeconomic outcomes...

The paper investigates the degree of exchange rate pass-through to import and consumer prices in Nigeria between 1986Q1 and 2007Q4 on the basis of vector error correction methodology. Results reveal that exchange rate pass-through in Nigeria is low, slightly higher in the import than in the...

We derive the parameter restrictions that a standard equity market model implies for a bivariate vector autoregression for stock prices and dividends, and we show how to test these restrictions using likelihood ratio tests. The restrictions, which imply that stock returns are unpredictable, are...

In this paper we discuss identification of codependent VAR and VEC models. Codependence of order q is given if a linear combination of autocorrelated variables eliminates the serial correlation after q lags. Importantly, maximum likelihood estimation and corresponding likelihood ratio testing...

We analyze non-stationary time series that do not only trend together in the long run, but restore the equilibrium immediately in the period following a deviation. While this represents a common serial correlation feature, the framework is extended to codependence, allowing for delayed...

If stock prices followed a random walk, uncertainty about future stock prices would be so great that the observed bias towards equities in long-term investment portfolios would be surprising. The good news is that if, as a growing body of research suggests, there is even a weak tendency for...

The colombian urban unemployment rate grew dramatically over the last six years. At the same time the real wage also had a sharp increase: The empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that an exogenous increase in the real wage was a cause of the unemployment growth. The long-run elasticity...

This paper evaluates the effects of capital account controls adopted in the past years by the FLAR’s member countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Perú and Venezuela) on the efficiency of the banking sector, the economic growth and the volatility of output, consumption, and...