The seaborne steam coal market changed in recent years. Trade volumes grew dynamically, important players emerged and since 2007 prices increased significantly and remained relatively high since then. In this paper we analyse market equilibria in the years 2006 and 2008 by testing for two...

During 2007 and 2008 steam coal prices soared to unprecedented levels. Since then much has been speculated about the drivers of these price peaks. This paper is concerned with the costs of steam coal allocation in the seaborne market and their influence on the price equilibrium. It presents an...

If oil exporters stabilize the purchasing power of their export revenues in terms of imports, exchange rate developments (and particularly, developments in the US dollar/euro exchange rate) may contain information about oil price changes. This hypothesis depends on three conditions: (a) OPEC has...

This paper develops a simple model that analyses the relationship between a country's oil endowment and the duration of its autocratic leader. The dictator uses the rents from oil extraction for both personal gain and to pay-off potential opposition and chooses an optimal level of oil...

We tackle explicitly the issue of model uncertainty in the framework of binary variable models of currency crises. Using Bayesian model averaging techniques, we assess the robustness of the explanatory variables proposed in the recent literature for both static and dynamic models. Our results...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel data after controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happiness can be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A rise in income causes...

Resource curse theory claims that resource abundance encourages violent conflict. A study of 37 oil-producing developing countries, however, reveals that oil states with very high levels of oil revenue are remarkably stable. An analysis of the ways in which governments spend oil revenues...

The European Union growth agenda has become even more pressing because growth is needed to support public and private sector deleveraging, reduce the fragility of the banking sector, counter the falling behind of southern European countries and prove that Europe is still a worthwhile place to...

- Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in...