The introduction of the common currency in the Euro zone has led to a shift in factor importance from country to industry effects. Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence that the recent spate of crises has engendered a reversal in factor importance, returning it to country effect. This...

Increasing integration of the Asian Tigers with the world economy through trade has exposed their income and trade to greater uncertainty and volatility. This paper models uncertainty in trade and income and re-examines the stability of the trade-growth nexus for Japan and the Asian Tigers in a...

The influence of socio-economic factors and social affiliation on living standards is shown to be contingent on the living standard status of the household. This new result casts doubt on studies that use conditional mean regression analysis and the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition analysis to...

Purpose – This paper seeks to revisit the highly debated trade-growth hypothesis by considering the effects of trade and output volatility on the relationship between trade and economic growth. Design/methodology/approach – The relationship is modeled by testing for the existence of output...

The use of parametric GARCH models to characterize crude oil price volatility is widely observed in the empirical literature. In this paper, we consider an alternative approach involving nonparametric method to model and forecast oil price return volatility. Focusing on two crude oil markets,...

This paper provides some empirical evidence on the sources of growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Within the classical convergence framework, several macroeconomic, socio and political factors are identified as affecting the steady state growth paths of the SSA countries. The rejection of the...

The Friedman-Ball hypothesis implies a link between the inflation rate and inflation uncertainty. In this paper we employ a new test for the joint null hypothesis of no dependence effects and no asymmetry in the G7 inflation volatility. The results show that higher inflation rates operate...

This paper employs a Markov-switching approach to model the dynamics of East Asian short rates. Regime changes are incorporated in standard unit root test to reveal periodic changes in the stationarity property of interest rates. There is evidence that three of the five short rates follow a...

This paper derives short-term interest rate volatility forecasts from various interest rate models. While models that specify both GARCH and levels effects are superior in their forecasts accuracy, they systematically under predict interest rate volatility more frequently than simple short rate...

Recent empirical evidence of nonlinearities in the time series behaviour of exchange rates suggests that a linear model of the exchange rate may yield invalid inference when used to assess the effectiveness of central bank intervention. Using a double threshold GARCH model of the Japanese yen-US...