Recent international mergers have potentially revived interest in a long-standing concern of U.S. courts that, under certain conditions, a conglomerate that buys from and sells products to its intermediary supplier may be able to profitably leverage its downstream market power to restrict...

This paper investigates welfare gains and channels of risk sharing among 14 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, including the oil-rich Gulf region and the resource scarce economies such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The results show that, for the 1992-2009 period, the overall...

This paper studies the joint dynamics of U.S. inflation and the average inflation predictions of the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) on a sample running from 1968Q4 to 2014Q2. The joint data generating process (DGP) of these data consists of the unobserved components (UC) model of Stock...

The modified harmonic mean is widely used for estimating the marginal likelihood. We investigate the empirical performance of two versions of this estimator: one based on the observed-data likelihood and the other on the complete-data likelihood. Through an empirical example using US and UK...

This paper generalizes the popular stochastic volatility in mean model of Koopman and Hol Uspensky (2002) to allow for time-varying parameters in the conditional mean. The estimation of this extension is nontrival since the volatility appears in both the conditional mean and the conditional...

Food security is an important social objective and relying on international food markets to meet the needs of Indonesia's growing population is precarious. The policy of restricting food imports through tariffs or quantitative restrictions promotes the goal of food self-sufficiency, but does so...

The economic implications for Australia of replacing its carbon tax policy with an Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) scheme are examined. A computable general equilibrium model is used to show that the budget allocated for the ERF is about 50 per cent of that required to meet Australia's greenhouse...

This paper examines the impact of structural oil price shocks on the covariance of U.S. stock market return and stock market volatility. We construct from daily data on return and volatility the covariance of return and volatility at monthly frequency. The measures of daily volatility are...

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is a hypothesized relationship between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. As economies get richer environmental impacts first rise but eventually fall. In reality, though some types of environmental degradation have been...

We construct a hybrid, economic indicator of the sustainability of global well-being, which is more inclusive than existing indicators and incorporates an environmentally pessimistic, physical constraint on global warming. Our methodology extends the World Bank's Adjusted Net Saving (ANS)...