This paper examines the conditional and unconditional mean returns and variance of returns of daily gold and silver contracts over the 1982-2002 period. Despite the importance of these metals as industrial and investment products, they have received scant attention in recent years. In...

Traditionally, analysts and traders have expected to see a stable, reasonably predictable, relationship between the price (and thus the rate of return) of gold and silver. Both these metals retain important industrial, commercial and investment uses. Recent research has cast some doubt on this...

We undertake a first benchmark study of economic literacy in Ireland using a panel of 700 adults to assess the economic knowledge of respondents. Sources of economic information are analysed and ranked in order of usefulness. Accuracy of response in each section is analysed across each...

A concern often expressed in relation to cryptocurrencies is their environmental impact associated with increasing electricity consumption which is currently unregulated. To assist researchers and policy makers, we developed a new Index of Cryptocurrency Environmental Attention (ICEA) based on...

We investigate the case for Bordeaux and Rhone wine as an investment. The raw data analysed comprises of approx. 335,000 observations of wine sales prices and is analysed using the repeat sales regression method. General Red Bordeaux and Rhone wine indices are constructed for the period January...

We investigate the information shares of the two main centers of gold trading, over a 25 year period, using non-overlapping 4 month windows. We find that neither London nor New York are dominant in terms of price information share, that the dominant market switches from time to time and that...

Forward exchange rate unbiasedness hypothesis (FRUH) has been a widely researched subject for decades. Recently, the sample populations of these studies have expanded to include developing country currencies. The majority of these findings have been that forward rate biasedness is more...

Prior research suggests an inverse relationship between geographic distance and financial market linkages. In this paper, we examine whether and how cultural distance between countries mitigates this finding. We find that country-pairs exhibit higher linkages if they have smaller cultural...

Despite their importance there is a relative dearth on spillovers within the industrial metal class. This is particularly acute in regard to volatility spillovers. Using the Diebold and Yilmaz (2009) methodology we analyze these metals over a 20 year period, showing the evolution of volatility...

We offer the first examination of whether the gold forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future gold spot rate. We find strong evidence that it is not, particularly at longer maturities. Building on Aggarwal and Zong's (2008) approach to allow for investor risk aversion, we then examine...