Discouraging Rainforest Transformation: An Ex-ante Policy Impact Analysis

Despite extensive efforts made by national and international certification agencies, Indonesian smallholder farmers’ participation in palm oil certification schemes adoption remains low. A fundamental obstacle is the smallholder practice of rainforest transformation into oil palm plantation which is forbidden by the agencies. In this context, we investigate three policies that could lead to a reduction in rainforest deforestation by smallholders: price premium on certified palm oil; the provision of environmental information; contributor recognition. In order to evaluate the influence of the policies ex-ante, we conduct a social dilemma experiment involving rubber and oil palm smallholders in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. The findings indicate that the price premium and provision of context-specific environmental information could reduce rainforest transformation. However, a statistically significant effect of contributor recognition was not found.     

Oil price and Gulf Corporation Council stock indices: New evidence from time-varying copula models

Using a time-varying GJR copula approach, we determine the conditional dependence of the GCC stock indices on oil price between 2007 and 2016. We show how to improve the forecasting accuracy of the co-movement of energy and stock prices in an equally weighted portfolio. Contrary to prior findings, we demonstrate that due to the different co-movements across the GCC stock indices, portfolios of oil assets and several GCC stocks are less likely to be affected by systemic risk. The different co-movements across several stock indices over time provide different entry and exit points for stock investors. This approach is in line with the ‘buy low/sell high’ adage.     

Extreme risk spillovers between crude palm oil prices and exchange rates

This study is the first attempt to examine the extreme risk spillovers between Malaysian crude palm oil (CPO) and foreign exchange currencies of the three largest CPO importers: India, the European Union and China throughout the global financial crisis. Using daily data of three currencies, CPO spot and futures from 2000 to 2018, our results show: First, before the crisis, the unexpected change in foreign exchange rates is the primary driver of risk spillover to the CPO market. Second, during the crisis, the extreme movement of CPO spot returns is dominant in the Malaysian exchange rates relative to the euro. Third, after the crisis, the spillover flows from the CPO market to the foreign exchange market. Overall, our findings show the importance of CPO pricing dynamics in mitigating foreign exchange risk over the crisis period. This paper contributes to the extant literature by recognizing the effect of risk spillover on the targeted foreign exchange rate for portfolio allocation.     

Labor and behavior determinants of remittances in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is the second largest sender of international remittances. These remittances constitute large foreign capital inflows to labor‐exporting remittee economies. This study is the first to structurally decompose remittance dynamics into behavioral and labor market outcomes of migrants. Remittance outflows are decomposed into migrant labor supply, unemployment and participation rates, wage earnings, and the marginal propensity to remit (MPR) out of migrant earnings. The estimates suggest that migrant labor supply is highly elastic. The important driver of remittance dynamics is the MPR, migrant wages, and the labor supply of migrants. The MPR is found to respond counter‐cyclically to foreign gross domestic product.     

Covariance breakdowns and connectedness of crude oil futures markets with non-synchronous data

ABSTRACT

This article identifies the breakdowns in the covariance of three benchmark crude oil futures markets (WTI, Brent and Dubai) and investigates the changes of market connectedness across the breakdown periods. As the crude oil futures are traded in different regions, this article eliminates the non-synchronous trading data by employing the Vector Moving Average structure and the Bayesian data augmentation approach, which keeps the integrity of original data without changing its properties. The results show that there are significant breaks in the covariance structure of crude oil futures markets. The breakdown periods are consistent with the periods when the market volatilities are at high level and the returns are volatile. The changes of market connectedness are independent of the covariance states, which supports the globalization hypothesis for the crude oil market. The results also suggest that there is more information flow out of the WTI than to the WTI during the sample period, particularly during the breakdown periods in 2008–2009.     

Impact of state-dependent oil price on US stock returns using local projections

In this paper, we investigate the impact of oil prices on both aggregate and industry US real stock returns over the period 1973–2017. The empirical analysis contributes to the related literature introducing a state-dependent oil price (high and low) and the local projections approach. Our main finding is that, depending on the nature of the shock and industry, the negative effects of oil price shocks become exacerbated -and the positive effects get moderated- if oil prices are already high.     

Buy Local! Familiarity and Preferences for Extra Virgin Olive Oil of Italian Consumers

Over the last few years, the origin of the local product has played a central role in consumer choices. This study explores what Italian consumers want and look for when purchasing olive oil by combining a web-based survey and a perceived analysis technique. In particular, preferences for different olive oil attributes as well as the psychographic traits of respondents were revealed through a web-based questionnaire administered to Italian consumers (N = 179). From this questionnaire, respondents who indicated their availability to participate further underwent a preference test under blind conditions (N = 99). Respondents also did an expectation test based on the visual observation of the labels. Results showed that the majority of consumers considered local production, PDO and region as factors of highest importance in determining olive oil quality.     

Forecasting value‐at‐risk in oil prices in the presence of volatility shifts

Recent evidence suggests shifts (structural breaks) in the volatility of returns causes non‐normality by significantly increasing kurtosis. In this paper, we endogenously detect significant shifts in the volatility of oil prices and incorporate this information to estimate Value‐at‐Risk (VaR) to accurately forecast large declines in oil prices. Our out‐of‐sample performance results indicate that the model, which incorporates both time varying volatility (without making any distributional assumptions) and shifts in volatility, produces more accurate VaR forecasts than several benchmark methods. We make a timely contribution as the recent more frequent occurrences of unexpected large oil price declines has gained significant attention because of its substantial impact on the financial markets and the global economy.     

“一带一路”背景下人民币国际化的原油计价研究

在"一带一路"倡议下,人民币国际化的原油计价面临着重大机遇:中国与"一带一路"沿线能源出口国利益互补、亚洲缺少原油定价中心、全球出现"去美元化"的趋势以及人民币国际化具备强有力支撑等条件,但同时也面临着资本管制与原油期货市场流动性的冲突、较低开放度的中国金融市场无法为人民币提供畅通的回流路径以及"新特里芬难题"等挑战。借鉴相关发展经验,应积极推进人民币原油期货市场建设、推进金融市场开放构建人民币环流、扩大与"一带一路"沿线国家(地区)的贸易往来、借助基础设施建设强化人民币计价功能等,努力实现人民币国际化的原油计价。     

高效液相色谱法同时测定食用油中7种抗氧化剂的方法研究

本研究利用高效液相色谱同时测定食用油中没食子酸丙酯(PG)、没食子酸月桂酯(DG)、没食子酸辛酯(OG)、叔丁基对苯二酚(TBHQ)、叔丁基对羟基茴香醚(BHA)、2,6-二叔丁基对甲基苯酚(BHT)、2,6-二叔丁基-4-羟甲基苯酚(Ionox-100)7种抗氧化剂的测定方法,样品中的抗氧化剂经正己烷溶解、乙腈萃取后,经C18柱分离,乙腈-1.5%乙酸溶液体系为流动相进行梯度洗脱,紫外检测器检测,外标法定量。选择线性范围在1~100mg/L,结果表明7种抗氧化剂呈良好的线性关系,相关系数r大于0.999,方法的测定低限为0.8~2.0mg/kg,回收率在89.3%~110.1%,变异系数在1.5%~4.9%。该方法准确、快速、重现性好,可用于大批量食用油检测中7种抗氧化剂的定量分析。