Displaying from 11 to 20 of 85 available piece of news category "Article"
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Time-frequency co-movements between commodities and global economic policy uncertainty
This study explores how economic uncertainty, driven by factors like political and health crises, influences various commodity prices.
Commodities, like metals, food, and energy, are becoming increasingly popular investments due to their low correlation with other assets, offering diversification benefits for portfolios. This research is unique because it examines a broad range of commodities (precious metals, food, etc.) across a long time period (1997-2022), encompassing major crises.
The study uses advanced techniques to analyze these relationships in detail. It goes beyond traditional methods by employing a tool called "wavelet analysis" to uncover how these connections change over time and across different frequencies. This provides a richer understanding of how commodity prices move together and how quickly they react to uncertainty.
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Modeling uncertainty in tourism markets
In the recent years the tourism sector has been hit by a number of uncertainty events. In this paper, Juan Antonio Duro, António Osório and Alejandro Perez-Laborda, researchers from the department of economics at URV and ECO-SOS, study how uncertainty impacts on the tourism markets and on the destinations price and promotion decisions. They consider a two-stage model with two reference destinations and product differentiation. Specifically, they distinguish between traveling and production costs/inputs uncertainty, and between informative and persuasive advertising. They found that uncertainty tends to increase prices as destinations pass uncertainty to consumers. However, in order to minimize the negative effect of higher prices in their bookings, destinations tend to intensify their promotion efforts. Altogether, uncertainty typically affects more consumers than destinations, which in most cases see their profits increase because of the increase in prices.
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The role of information sources as a driver of innovation
An extensive empirical literature shows the important role that information sources have on firm innovation. However, there is scarce evidence on the different typologies of between technological and non-technological innovations and their expectations. We investigate how the wide number of information sources affect the propensity to innovate and its future expectations. At the methodological level, we apply a multivariate Probit to the Innovation Survey of Chilean companies (2013-2016).
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Trade Costs and the Integration of British West Africa in the Global Economy
Despite the essential role of trade for African economies, in the extensive literature on the historical evolution of international trade costs, Africa is still missing. In this article, we contribute to filling this gap by (1) providing the first estimates of British West Africa's trade costs with Britain c. 1840-1940 by computing relative price gaps in a representative sample of African export and European import prices, and (2) analysing the main determinants of trade costs trends, by regressing price gaps on measures of transport costs, market efficiency, and trade barriers.
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The shipping industry under the EU Green Deal
In 2021, the European Commission unveiled the 'Fit for 55' package, part of the European Green Deal aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Central to this initiative is extending the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) to include the shipping industry, which contributes significantly to the EU's emissions.
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Financing patterns of working capital and physical investment
Firms must access financial markets to surpass financial barriers limiting innovation activities. However, an overreliance on debt might moderate creativity and innovativeness. From a sample of European manufacturing firms, and applying a system of equations using GSEM, we derive a function to determine the thresholds of the optimal acquisition of working capital and physical investment. Contrasting this information with the descriptive data, firms tend to under-finance working capital, as future short-term needs are more challenging to identify when designing investment plans. Additionally, we find evidence for the heterogeneous financial needs of firms operating in high-tech as compared to low-tech sectors, as well as other differences related to firm age.
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Unraveling the structural sources of oil production and their impact on CO2 emissions
This study is the first to present an explicit view of the structural determinants of oil production across the short-, medium-, and long-term. The analysis relies on a structural vector autoregressive model utilizing a purely agnostic and ICA-based identification approach. The results, obtained from impulse response functions, estimated oil supply and demand elasticities, the decomposition of forecast error variances, and the historical decomposition of oil production, all indicate that, over the past five decades, changes in crude oil demand have had only minor impacts on the actual level of oil production. Local projections of global CO2 emissions on annualized oil market shocks reveal that only supply and aggregate demand shocks have impacted on CO2 emissions, while oil-specific demand shocks did not exert any significant influence.
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Service-quality and pricing strategies in the airline industry: The role of distance
This paper analyzes airlines' fare and frequency decisions, both theoretically and empirically. These decisions depend on route distance, as only short-haul routes are affected by intermodal competition from personal transportation. Although fares increase with distance both on short- and long-haul routes, the effect of distance on frequencies depends on the presence of intermodal competition.
Frequencies decay with distance on long-haul routes. However, on short-haul routes, frequencies increase with distance because airlines try to boost profits by attracting demand from other transportation modes. Finally, on short-haul routes, intermodal competition from personal transportation affects more intensively network carriers than low-cost carriers as distance rises, which produces an increased differentiation between both types of airlines.
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Beyond trade statistics: how much do exports actually contribute to domestic value added?
Koopman et al. (2014) and Los et al. (2016) decomposed gross exports into various value added components by adopting the input-output assumption of disconnection between production and final demand. Such an assumption, however, neglects the ability of production inflows to generate income and consumption, and therefore additional impacts on production. To achieve a more complete understanding of the role played by trade, this article presents a method for quantifying the value added of exports that reflects the linkages between production and private consumption. In the tradition of Miyazawa (1968, 1976) and Sonis and Hewings (1973), the proposed model endogenously defines household consumption in the output determination, thus improving the way in which the interdependencies between income and output generation processes are revealed. The proposal is directly applicable empirically through available world trade databases.
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The Constrained Equal Losses family of rules for claims problems
In this study, we introduce a family of rules for claims problems called the CEL-family. The family is defined by means of a parameter theta in [0,1] as a notion of solidarity and contribution. It contains the Constrained equal losses and the Constrained equal awards rules. We perform an axiomatic analysis considering the main properties in the literature, for the sake of comparison. We apply the family to the distribution of the European Regional Development Funds to study how the rules in the family treat regions with relatively smaller claims compared to regions with relatively larger claims.
