This paper analyzes a new index for measuring central bank independence and inflation targeting in order to evaluate and assess the impact of central bank’s independence level upon the macroeconomic performance. The new index for measuring central bank independence and inflation targeting has...

Using cross-country time series data for 133 countries between 1984 and 2010, and implementing a fixed effects Poisson estimator using the gravity model of trade, we study the interaction between domestic and partner-country corruption and the treatment effect of a country joining the GATT-WTO...

As is well known, when using an information criterion to select the number of common factors in factor models the appropriate penalty is generally indetermine in the sense that it can be scaled by an arbitrary constant, c say, without affecting consistency. In an influential paper, Hallin and...

The world economic crisis that paralyzed the world economy in 2008 and 2009 had a profound impact on all countries in the world. Due to the interconnectedness of national economies the crisis spread rapidly from its centre in the United States to the world. There were two main transmission...

This paper presents an empirical analysis on residential demand for electricity. This analysis has been performed using aggregate panel data at the province level for 47 Spanish provinces for the period from 2000 to 2008. For this purpose, we estimated a log–log demand equation for electricity...

The sharp increase in energy prices and growing concern for environmental issues, among other things, are behind the renewed interest in energy demand estimation. However, there is scarce academic literature that takes real situation of energy suppliers into account: high quality but incomplete...

This paper employs a pair-wise approach to examine regional integration in the US gasoline market. Using gasoline price data at the state level over a period of more than two decades, we find strong support for the view that the law of one price holds in regional markets, as more than 80% of...

Hoeffding’s inequality provides a probability bound for the deviation between the average of n independent bounded random variables and its mean. This paper introduces two inequalities that extend Hoeffding’s inequality to panel data, which consists of several mutually independent sequences...

We investigate the association between African real stock returns and stock liquidity for sixteen countries over the years 1995–2010. Using fixed effect models (FEM) and system generalized method of moments (SGMM), stock returns and liquidity measures are positively related when South Africa...

This paper addresses the issue of impacts of central banks’ transparency on stock market volatility. Using a simple theoretical macroeconomic model, we analytically find a negative link between stock prices volatility and central bank transparency. By applying panel data analysis on a set of...