If oil exporters stabilize the purchasing power of their export revenues in terms of imports, exchange rate developments (and particularly, developments in the US dollar/euro exchange rate) may contain information about oil price changes. This hypothesis depends on three conditions: (a) OPEC has...

Panel data is used to investigate the extent of R&D spillovers between OECD countries, and the importance of barriers to technology adoption in affecting the benefits of such spillovers. Our results indicate that countries with less regulated goods and labour markets benefit more from foreign R&D.

We propose exploiting the term structure of relative interest rates to obtain estimates of changes in the timing of a currency crisis as perceived by market participants. Our indicator can be used to evaluate the relative probability of a crisis occurring in one week as compared to a crisis...

We analyze the performance of Bayesian model averaged exchange rate forecasts for euro/US dollar, euro/Japanese yen, euro/Swiss franc and euro/British pound rates using weights based on the out-of-sample predictive likelihood. The paper also presents a simple stratified sampling procedure in the...

We tackle explicitly the issue of model uncertainty in the framework of binary variable models of currency crises. Using Bayesian model averaging techniques, we assess the robustness of the explanatory variables proposed in the recent literature for both static and dynamic models. Our results...

We propose a new time series model aimed at forecasting crude oil prices. The proposed specification is an unobserved components model with an asymmetric cyclical component. The asymmetric cycle is defined as a sine-cosine wave where the frequency of the cycle depends on past oil price...

In this paper we put forward a Bayesian Model Averaging method dealing with model uncertainty in the presence of potential spatial autocorrelation. The method uses spatial filtering in order to account for different types of spatial links. We contribute to existing methods that handle spatial...

We provide a systematic comparison of the out-of-sample forecasts based on multivariate macroeconomic models and forecast combinations for the euro against the US dollar, the British pound, the Swiss franc and the Japanese yen. We use profit maximization measures based on directional accuracy...

We construct a new dataset of inequality in educational attainment by age and sex at the global level. The comparison of education inequality measures across age groups allows us to assess the effect of inter-generational education attainment trends on economic growth. Our results indicate that...

We present a method aimed at estimating global bilateral migration flows and assessing their determinants. We employ that fact that available net migration figures for a country are (nonlinear) aggregates of migration flows from and to all other countries of the world in order to construct a...