This paper examines the relationship between biofuels and commodity food prices in the U.S. from a new perspective. While a large body of literature has tried to explain the linkages between sample means and volatilities associated with ethanol and agricultural price returns, little is known...

This paper examines the relationship between biofuels and commodity food prices in the U.S. from a new perspective. While a large body of literature has tried to explain the linkages between sample means and volatilities associated with ethanol and agricultural price returns, little is known...

We study the relationship between the risk of default and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors using Supervised Machine Learning (SML) techniques on a cross-section of European listed companies. Our proxy for credit risk is the z-score originally proposed by Altman (1968).We...

The relevance of oil in the world economy explains why considerable effort has been devoted to the development of different types of econometric models for oil price forecasting. Several specifications have been proposed in the economic literature. Some are based on financial theory and...

Since its first inception in the debate on the relationship between environment and growth in 1992, the Environmental Kuznets Curve has been subject to continuous and intense scrutiny. The literature can be roughly divided in two historical phases. Initially, after the seminal contributions,...

Sharp increases in the price of oil are generally seen as a major contributor to business cycle asymmetries. Moreover, the very recent highs registered in the world oil market are causing concern about possible slowdowns in the economic performance of the most developed countries. While several...

In this paper we review the existing empirical literature on price asymmetries in commodities, providing a way to classify and compare different studies which are highly heterogeneous in terms of econometric models, type of asymmetries and empirical findings. Relative to the previous literature,...

This article explains how to obtain straightforward extensions of the most popular univariate non-nested statistics, and of the RESET-test, to a multivariate context and examines how to use these tests to compare alternative factor demand systems. The empirical application involves the classical...

The identification of the forces that drive stock returns and the dynamics of their associated volatilities is a major concern in empirical economics and finance. This analysis is particularly relevant for determining optimal hedging strategies based on whether shocks to the volatilities of...

Since oil is a non-renewable resource with a high environmental impact, and its most common use is to produce combustibles for electricity, reliable methods for modelling electricity consumption can contribute to a more rational employment of this hydrocarbon fuel. In this paper we apply the...