Evidence of Credit Risk Contagion Between Corporate and Financial Sectors

We propose a copula-GARCH framework to analyze the credit risk dependence structure between the European corporate and financial sectors. Empirical study is conducted on two representative iTraxx indices. In order to better capture the dynamic behavior of dependence we allow copula parameters to be time-varying by specifying them as a function of past values and standardized score of the copula log-likelihood. The results obtained indicate a time-varying dependence structure with statistically significant tail dependence coefficients supporting the existence of credit risk contagion effects. Goodness-of-fit tests are used to indicate which model is closest to the true conditional copula. Our findings provide further evidence supporting the interconnectivity of credit risk between corporates and financial institutions operating on the European market.     

Sorting It Out: Technical Barriers to Trade and Industry Productivity

Trade economists traditionally study the effect of lower variable trade costs. While increasingly important politically, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) have received less attention. Viewing TBTs as fixed regulatory costs related to the entry into export markets, we use a model with heterogeneous firms, trade in differentiated goods, and variable external economies of scale to sort out the rich interactions between TBT reform, input diversity, firm-level productivity, and aggregate productivity. We calibrate the model for 14 industries in order to clarify the theoretical ambiguities. Overall, our results tend to suggest beneficial effects of TBT reform but also reveal interesting sectoral variation.     

Brain drain and income distribution

In a context in which increased income inequality has raised much concern, and skilled workers move easily across countries, an important question arises: how does the brain drain affect income distribution in the source economy? We address this question and introduce two contributions to the literature on brain drain. First, we present and solve a simple stylized model to study whether and, if so, how the brain drain affects the distribution of income, in a context in which higher education is publicly financed with general taxes. Second, we explore empirically the effect of an increase in skilled emigration on income distribution. A key prediction of our theoretical model is the existence of a non-monotonic relationship between income inequality and emigration of skilled workers. Our empirical data confirm this result, showing a statistically significant inverse U-shaped form.     

Julian Simon,the problem of socio-ecological resilience and the “ultimate resource”: a reinterpretation

The Review of Austrian Economics - The article argues that the debate between “the limits to growth” movement and Julian Simon could be reconstructed and reinterpreted in the light of...     

Instability in cointegration regressions: a brief review with an application to money demand in Portugal

This study addresses some modelling questions related to the possibility of structural change in models with nonstationary variables. Focusing on cointegration issues, some methodological aspects are discussed, attempting to integrate coherently the several steps of the modelling strategy. These range from unit root to cointegration testing and to testing for instability in the cointegration vector. An empirical example with Portuguese data tries to illustrate the usefulness of this approach, where a simple money demand function is estimated using an error-correction model (ECM). If a break is explicitly allowed in the cointegration vector the forecasting performance of the ECM improves.