Does crude oil move stock markets in Europe? A sector investigation

The aim of this article is to investigate the responses of European sector stock markets to oil price changes. We use linear and asymmetric models and study the association of oil and stock prices. Our findings suggest that the strength of this association varies greatly across sectors. Moreover, for some sectors we find strong evidence of asymmetry in the reaction of stock returns to changes in the price of oil.     

How helpful is a long memory on financial markets?

Summary. How should portfolio decisions depend on the past? In a simple model with boundedly rational agents we show that there is no universal answer to this question. Both, long and short memory, can be optimal in the appropriate environment. In most cases there is an equilibrium where both dispositions are equally successful. We characterize such equilibria for the case of two assets and two states. For dynamics based on average payoff, equilibria are global attractors whereas discrete choice dynamics in general do not converge to the equilibrium. Received: August 31, 1998; revised version: November 15, 1999     

Cyclical behavior of crude oil markets and economic recessions in the period 1986–2010

For at least one century, crude oil has been one of the most important commodities for the worldwide economic activity. Important technological innovations, including chemical transformation processes and transportation systems, have been based on the availability or not of crude oil. In this way, a close understanding of the crude oil market dynamics should provide insights in important aspects related to potential directions of technological change for both improving crude oil transformation efficiency and substitution by alternative energy sources. This paper studies the dynamics of the crude oil price for the period from 1986 to 2010. To this end, the entropy time-asymmetry is computed along the price trajectory. Empirical results indicated the presence of a non-regular cyclical behavior with a dominant period of about 4.5 years. Some evidences pointing toward a comovement of entropy time-asymmetry peaks with major US economic recessions are found, suggesting a tight relationship between macroeconomy and crude oil prices. The results are discussed in terms of the major economic events that occurred in the upward and downward cycle periods and potential implications for the design of energy policies.     

What explains long memory in futures price volatility?

Long memory in futures price volatility is a well-documented stylized fact with implications for market efficiency, risk management, forecasting and option pricing bias. The implications of long-memory differ, however, based on whether it is of a ‘fractional’ or of a ‘stochastic’ type. The aims of this article are to determine, in the case of agricultural commodity futures data, which type better describes price volatility and also to evaluate several competing explanations for findings of long memory. The evidence presented here finds little support for three out of four potential explanations, namely, excessive noise in the volatility measure, bias in the long-memory estimator and understated SEs of the long-memory parameter. For the data considered, price volatility appears to be most likely generated by a nonfractional long-memory process such as a stochastic break or stochastic unit root.     

Testing for long memory in Chinese stock market

This paper proposes a long memory analysis based on wavelet transform of financial data. This method treats return series and volatility series in the stock market as a fractional differenced noise process, and analyzes it by MODWT（maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform）. The result shows there is a lineal relationship between wavelet variance logarithm and scale logarithm, so a long memory parameter can be obtained by using the relationship. This method is proved to be effective and feasible by analyzing the return series and volatility series of composite indexes of Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market.     

Can capacity markets be designed by democracy?

In the United States, Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) operate the power grid serving nearly 70% of electricity customers and are critical organizations for ensuring reliable system operations and facilitating the integration of new technologies and market participants. RTOs are designed to be stakeholder-driven organizations, with rules and policies crafted through a highly participatory process. While the decisions that RTOs make have implications for industry, society and the environment, their decision processes have not been modeled in any systematic way. In this paper, we develop a modeling framework for the stakeholder process of PJM, an RTO serving thirteen states plus the District of Columbia, adapting some of the seminal literature from political science and political economy on the theory of voting systems. This modeling framework can generate predictions of stakeholder process outcomes, identify strong coalitions among stakeholders and identify shifts in political power in the formulation of RTO market rules. We illustrate this analysis framework using a detailed data set from stakeholder deliberations of capacity market reform in PJM. Our model predicts that the current structure of the stakeholder process in PJM makes the passage of capacity market reforms through the stakeholder process virtually impossible because it creates strong coalitions that would favor or oppose changes to capacity market rules. In the capacity market case, we also identify a small subset of voters that act as swing voters and confirm that political power is shifted to these voters by deviations from otherwise strong coalitions and abstentions from the voting process altogether. Our framework represents the first attempt to model the decision-making behavior of RTOs in any systematic way, and points towards emerging research needs in evaluating the governance structure of RTOs.     

Why are crude oil prices high when global activity is weak?

There have been substantial increases in liquidity in recent years and real oil prices have almost returned to the high levels achieved before the global financial crisis. Unanticipated increases in global real M2 led to statistically significant increases in real oil prices. The historical impact of global real M2 on the real price of crude oil is important in the recovery of oil prices over 2009 to 2011.     

Are crude oil spot and futures prices cointegrated? Not always!

In previous studies, the cointegration relationships between crude oil spot and futures prices are confirmed based on Johansen (1988) test and vector error correction model (VECM). These conventional methods assume that the process of long-run equilibrium adjustment is linear. This paper revisits this topic employing nonlinear threshold VECM to take into account the nonlinear dynamics of equilibrium adjustment. Our results show that crude oil spot and futures prices are cointegrated only when the price differentials are larger than the threshold value. Moreover, we use a multi-frequency analysis based on low-pass filtering with different cut-off frequencies. The main findings indicate that the relationships between spot and futures prices are different between in the short-term and in the long-term. In the short-term, futures price plays the major role in the formation of long-run equilibrium (error correction mechanism). In the long-term, both spot and futures prices contribute to the dynamics of long-run equilibrium.     

Does final energy demand in Portugal exhibit long memory? A fractional integration analysis

In this paper, we measure the degree of fractional integration in final energy demand in Portugal using an ARFIMA model with and without adjustments for seasonality. We consider aggregate energy demand as well as final demand for petroleum, electricity, coal, and natural gas. Our findings suggest the presence of long memory in all of the components of energy demand. All fractional-difference parameters are positive and lower than 0.5 indicating that the series are stationary, although with mean reversion patterns slower than in the typical short-run processes. These results have important implications for the design of energy policies. As a result of the long-memory in final energy demand, the effects of temporary policy shocks will tend to disappear slowly. This means that even transitory shocks have long lasting effects. Given the temporary nature of these effects, however, permanent effects on final energy demand require permanent policies. This is unlike what would be suggested by the more standard, but much more limited, unit root approach, which would incorrectly indicate that even transitory policies would have permanent effects.     

Superstitious seasonality in precious metals markets? Evidence from GARCH models with time-varying skewness and kurtosis

In this article, we analyse whether the Friday the 13th effect documented by Kolb and Rodriguez (1987) can be observed in precious metals markets. Specifically, we use dummy-augmented GARCH models to investigate the impact of this specific calendar day on the conditional means of gold, silver, palladium and platinum returns. The specification of the GARCH model follows a flexible class recently proposed by León et al. (2005) that incorporates time-varying skewness and kurtosis by applying a Gram–Charlier series expansion of the normal density function. Our results for the period from July 1996 to August 2013 provide three important insights. First, there is no evidence that human superstition regarding bad luck Fridays affects precious metals markets in a negative way, i.e. returns on Fridays the 13th are not significantly lower than on regular Fridays. Second, besides showing robustness in a variety of settings, we can confirm this main result in a sensitivity check, where we replace the dummy variables by a new measure of investor attention, recently promoted by Da et al. (2011), that is based on Google search volumes. Third, as an important by-product of our study, we can show that there is significant evidence of time-varying skewness and kurtosis in precious metals returns.     

Can industry regulators learn collusion structures from information-efficient asset markets?

This note combines a dynamic industrial organization model, in which an industry is subject to exogenous processes of market-size and collusion structure, with a consumption-based asset pricing model for the shares in the industry’s firms. Three main findings emerge for our model under the assumption of information-efficient asset markets. First, the volatility of a firm’s share price is exclusively driven by the volatility of the industry’s market-size. Second, the volatility of a firm’s price-dividend ratio is exclusively driven by the volatility of the industry’s collusion structure whereby high (resp. low) ratios indicate less (resp. more) collusion. Third, for non-volatile collusion structures the price-dividend ratio is constant across different collusion structures.     

Alternatives to conventional crude oil: When, how quickly, and market driven?

We examine the effect of uncertainty concerning remaining supplies of conventional crude oil and its production path on: the date alternative fuels will be needed, the quantity of alternative fuels needed, and how this uncertainty affects firms' willingness to provide alternatives in a timely fashion. Despite large uncertainties about the quantity of oil that remains and its production path, the start date for replacements is likely to fall within a twenty-two year period that is narrower and earlier than previous estimates. The twenty-two year window represents considerable uncertainty about the date of the peak and this uncertainty creates an asymmetry in the strategy that maximizes the welfare of firms relative to total social welfare, which works against the market's ability to generate a smooth transition from oil to alternative fuels. The timeliness of this transition is critical—the production paths generated here suggest that 10 million barrels per day or more of alternative fuels will be needed within a decade of the peak in production of conventional crude oil.     

Is economic policy uncertainty important to forecast the realized volatility of crude oil futures?

In this research, we first investigate whether economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index can increase the HAR-RV-type models’ forecast accuracy. In addition, we explore how EPU index can be effectively used to gain larger economic values in the oil futures market. To this end, this research provides a new perspective on setting thresholds for EPU and examines whether these thresholds can help improve both the forecast accuracy and economic values. Empirical results suggest that the HAR-RV-type models including EPU can generate more accurate forecasts and economic values. The HAR-RV-type models including above-threshold EPU can further improve the forecast accuracy and yield higher economic values by setting specific thresholds for a range of horizons. The findings highlight the importance of EPU and effective way of using EPU in risk management and portfolio strategies that is crucial for investors and policymakers.     

The time-varying and asymmetric dependence between crude oil spot and futures markets: Evidence from the Mixture copula-based ARJI–GARCH model

This paper designs a Mixture copula-based ARJI–GARCH model to simultaneously investigate the dynamic process of crude oil spot and futures returns and the time-varying and asymmetric dependence between spot and futures returns. The individual behavior of each market is modeled by the ARJI–GARCH process. The time-varying and asymmetric dependence is captured by the Mixture copula which is composed of the Gumbel copula and Clayton copula. Empirical results show three important findings. First, jumping behavior is an important process for each market. Second, spot and futures returns do not have the same jump process. Third, the tail dependence between spot and futures markets is time-varying and asymmetric with the magnitude of upper tail dependence being slightly weaker than that of lower tail dependence.     

Demand for collective goods in private nonprofit markets: Can fundraising expenditures help overcome free-rider behavior?

Economic theory ascribes the primary role in the provision of public goods to government. This emphasis on government overlooks the role of the not-for-profit sector in providing collective-type goods. In this paper we seek to determine the factors influencing charitable contributions to private nonprofit organizations by estimating a demand function for the output of these collective-good providers. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that voluntary giving is responsive to conventional market variables such as advertising expenditures, price, and quality. Overall, the results are strongly supportive.     

Political markets? Politics and economics in the emergence of markets for biodiversity offsets

This paper analyses the relationship between politics and performativity of economics in the emergence of markets for biodiversity offsets. While the role of economics in constructing markets has been demonstrated by sociology and social studies of science, it has also become apparent that politics plays an important role in the material outcome of economic experiments. Two case studies of the creation of markets for biodiversity offsets are analysed, in the United States and England. The findings suggest that the creation of both markets is rooted in the language, concepts and models of economics. Politics, on the other hand, functions as a mediator of the material expression of those models. Through this mediation effect, similar economic models are performed differently, resulting in a variety of markets. This suggests that the material outcomes of processes of market creation are not defined at the outset, but can be influenced by political processes.     

Moving toward markets? Labor allocation in rural China

China's economic reforms have brought rapid growth in rural off-farm employment, raising questions about the assumption that rural China is labor surplus and has poorly functioning factor markets. We investigate this by testing for separability between household labor demand and supply using panel data. We find that separability is rejected overall, indicating that factor markets remain underdeveloped. Nonseparability, however, is associated with labor surplus in some areas and labor shortage in others. Moreover, separability holds where substantial employment opportunities exist in the wider township, suggesting that such employment promotes competitive allocation within villages as well as the inter-village movement of resources.     

What role should public enterprises play in free-entry markets?

We investigate a desirable role of public enterprise in mixed oligopoly in free-entry markets. We compare the following three cases: (a) a public firm produces before private firms (public leadership), (b) all firms produce simultaneously (Cournot), (c) a public firm produces after private firms (private leadership). We find that private leadership is best and public leadership is worst, in contrast to the cases without entries and exits of private firms. We also investigate the welfare implication of privatization. We find that some important results shown by existing works do not hold under private leadership.     

Does speculation Granger cause return in Chinese commodity markets?

We test the Granger causal relations between speculation and returns in Chinese commodity markets using quantile regression method. We find that speculation Granger causes returns in rebar, bean pulp and rapeseed oil markets. At lower quantiles, estimates are negative; but estimates are positive at upper quantiles. This indicates that larger speculation results in larger return volatility.