The primary objective of this study is to assess the optimality of a currency area in the six Gulf countries. To evaluate this important strategic it is crucial to investigate the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area. These countries are Saudi Arabia,...

We build upon recent research that attributes the moderation of output volatility since the 1980s to the reduced volatility of the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) by investigating the linkage between energy price fluctuations and the stochastic process for TFP. First, we estimate a joint...

We use wavelet analysis to study the impact of the Euro adoption on the oil price macroeconomy relation in the Euroland. We uncover evidence that the oil-macroeconomy relation changed in the past decades. We show that after the Euro adoption some countries became more similar with respect to how...

The objective of this paper is to examine the factors that determine the inflow of foreign direct investment to Qatar and the attractiveness of the country to foreign direct investment i.e., identifying the role of major macroeconomic variables that determine FDI, namely; Gross Domestic Product,...

This paper analyses the impact of oil both price shocks on the GDP and prices in the Spanish economy and its seventeen NUTS-2 regions. The Qu and Perron (2007) and the Bai and Perron (1998, 2003a and 2003b) methods identify different periods across the sample. Evidence in favour of a diminishing...

This paper develops a 9-dimensional SVAR to investigate the sources of the U.S. business cycle. We extend the standard set of identified shocks to include unexpected changes in commodity prices. Our main result is that commodity price shocks are a very important driving force of macroeconomic...

This paper reinvestigates the influence of oil price uncertainty on real economic activity in the U.S. using a four-variable VAR, GARCH-in-mean, asymmetric BEKK model. In contrast to previous studies in this area, the analysis focuses on business cycle fluctuations and we control for global...

Recently, Baumeister and Hamilton (henceforth: BH) have argued that existing studies of the global oil market fail to account for uncertainty about their identifying assumptions. They recommend an alternative econometric approach intended to address this concern by formulating priors on the...

The role that the price of oil plays in economic analysis in central banks as well as in financial markets has evolved over time. Oil is not seen anymore just as a input to production but also as a barometer of global economic activity as well as a financial asset. A high frequency structural...

This paper investigates the link between oil price uncertainty shocks and key macroeconomic indicators of a net oil importing country, South Africa. Monthly data covering the period 1990:01 to 2015:12 is used. The Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) methodology is applied incorporating...