Regional integration occupies a prominent place in the economic policies of most sub-Saharan African countries. However, despite different waves of initiatives across the African continent, the majority of African regional schemes have not managed to achieve their ambitious goal of promoting...

In the context of the recent slump in global oil prices, the paper investigates the effect of oil price shocks on the economic performance of 51 individual OECD and OPEC economies. We propose an error correction model which allows us to differentiate between short- and longrun price effects. For...

This paper delves into the well-known phenomenon of shrinking wage elasticities for married women in the US over recent decades. The results of a novel model experimental approach via sample data ordering unveil considerable heterogeneity across different wage groups. Yet, surprisingly constant...

This paper re-examines the instrumental variable approach to estimating the effect of compulsory school law on education in the US pioneered by Angrist and Krueger (1991). We show that the approach not only yields empirically inconsistent estimates but is conceptually confused. The confusion...

Aggregate financial conditions indices (FCIs) are constructed to fulfill two aims: (i) The FCIs should resemble non-model based composite indices in that their composition is adequately invariant for concatenation during regular updates; (ii) the concatenated FCIs should outperform as leading...

The close relationship between commodity future and cash prices is critical for the effectiveness of risk management and the functioning of price discovery. However, in recent years, commodity futures prices, across the board, have appeared increasingly detached from prices on physical markets....

The paper develops a price discovery model for commodity futures markets that accounts for two forms of limits to arbitrage caused by transaction costs and noise trader risk. Four market regimes are identified: (1) effective arbitrage, (2) transaction costs but no noise trader risk, (3) no...

The increasing inflow of institutional investors replicating broad based indices into commodity futures markets has been linked to excessive calendar spreads and anomalies in futures curves. At the same time, these investors have been welcomed as liquidity providers. This paper hypothesises that...

Multiple imputation (MI) techniques are applied to simulate missing wage rates of nonworking wives under the missing-at-random (MAR) condition. The assumed selection effect of the labour force participation decision is framed as deviations of the imputed wage rates from MAR. By varying the...