We analyze the relationships between biodiesel, ethanol and related fuels and agricultural commodities with a use of minimal spanning trees and hierarchical trees and Granger causality. We construct this trees for different frequencies (weekly, monthly and quarterly). We find that in short-term,...

Recent studies attempt to quantify the empirical importance of news shocks (ie., anticipated future schocks) in business cycle fluctuations. This paper identifies news schocks in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model estimated with not only actual data but also forecast data. The...

Do countries compete for FDI by liberalizing their FDI policy regimes? Our measure of FDI policy liberalization is an event count of changes made by a country in a given year in the areas of approval procedures, sectoral restrictions, operational conditions, incentives, investment guarantees,...

This paper places the data revision model of Jacobs and van Norden (2011) within a class of trend-cycle decompositions relating directly to the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition. In both these approaches identifying restrictions on the covariance matrix under simple and realistic conditions may...

In this paper, we show that consumption externalities are a source of equilibrium indeterminacy in a growth model with endogenous labor supply. In particular, when the marginal rate of substitution between own consumption and the others' consumption is constant along the equilibrium path, the...

We propose a new approach to analyze relationships and dependencies between price series. For the biofuels markets and the related commodities, we study their mutual responsiveness, which can be understood as price cross-elasticities. Several methodological caveats are uncovered and discussed....

This paper studies the implications of adaptive learning in the modelling of international linkages in a two-region MSG-Cubed (MSG3) model built on micro-founded behaviours of firms and households. The nature of the transmission process under rational expectations versus the adaptive learning...

With nominal interest rates near the zero lower bound (ZLB) in many major economies, it has become untenable to apply Gaussian affine term structure models (GATSMs) while ignoring their inherent theoretical deficiency of non-zero probabilities of negative interest rates. In this article I...

Macroeconomists working with multivariate models typically face uncertainty over which (if any) of their variables have long run steady states which are subject to breaks. Furthermore, the nature of the break process is often unknown. In this paper, we draw on methods from the Bayesian...

The Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) continue their efforts to forge a new binding international agreement by 2015. The negotiations face daunting odds, but the 2009 Copenhagen Accord's shift towards heterogeneous national commitments was a positive...