Structural Changes in the Duration of Bull Markets and Business Cycle Dynamics

Asia-Pacific Financial Markets - This paper tests for structural changes in the duration of bull regimes in 18 developed and emerging economies’ adjusted market capitalization stock indexes,...     

Information search in complex industrial buying: Empirical evidence from Brazil

This study develops and tests a model of information search in complex buying. We incorporate three categories of influences of organizational, personal and situational factors that affect information searching efforts. A sample of 96 of the largest Brazilian firms reported their use of the various influences in the decision to purchase integrated business management systems. Findings show that formalization of the organization is a key driver of information search efforts. Situational characteristics of importance, novelty and bargaining power increased the level of information search. Also, conformity of the purchasing agent and organizational centralization reduce information search efforts among the sampled Brazilian firms.     

Estimating the economic costs of electricity deficit using input–output analysis: the case of Brazil

The objective of this article is to present a methodology to estimate the marginal cost of electric energy deficit in the long-term using input–output (I–O) analysis. We obtain a deficit marginal cost (DMC) curve that is not limited to a small number of levels, such as the curve used currently in Brazil, which is limited to four levels. The marginal cost of deficit is an important exogenous parameter used in the model’s chain to calculate the operation’s marginal cost and short-term market pricing. The electric energy deficit is a temporary lack of continuity in meeting demand, which is usually predictable and involves prior notice to the consumer. The cause of this deficit may be a lack of investment and/or low water inflows that impact the production of hydroelectric power plants. In this study, the marginal cost of the deficit is obtained from restrictions on the provision of electricity for productive sectors and by calculating the corresponding impact on the gross domestic product. The proposed methodology can be used with data from the I–O matrix of any country to estimate its marginal cost of electric energy deficit.     

Nowcasting unemployment rate and new car sales in south-western Europe with Google Trends

This work presents a study describing the use of Internet search information to achieve an improved nowcasting ability with simple autoregressive models, using data from four countries and two different application domains with social and economic significance: unemployment rate and car sales. The results we obtained differ by country/language and application area. In the case of unemployment, we find that Google Trends data lead to the improvement of nowcasts in three out of the four considered countries: Portugal, France and Italy. However, there are sometimes important differences in the predictive ability of these data when we consider different out-of-sample periods. For car sales, we find that, in some cases, the volume of search queries helps explaining the variance of the car sales data. However, we find little support for the hypothesis that search query data may improve predictions, and we present several possible reasons for these results. Taking all results into account, we conclude that, when Google Trends variables are significantly different from zero in-sample, they tend to lead to improvements in out-of-sample predictive ability. The results can have implications for nowcasting, by providing some indications regarding the advantage or not of the use of search data to improve simple models and indirectly by highlighting the sensitivity of the approach to the actual country-specific base, nowcasting period and search data.