Using an overlapping generations production-economy model characterised by financial repression, purposeful government expenditures and tax collection costs, we analyse whether financial repression can be explained by the cost of raising taxes. We show that with public expenditures affecting...

Using two dynamic monetary general equilibrium models characterized by endogenous growth, financial repression and endogenously determined tax evasion, we analyze whether financial repression can be explained by tax evasion. When calibrated to four Southern European economies, we show that...

Motivated by financial liberalization investors seek for new investment opportunities through international portfolio diversification. To this end we explore any asymmetric causal relationship between developed European stock markets (German, France and U.K) and emerging Baltic markets namely;...

We study the directional accuracy of South African survey data of short-term and longer-term inflation forecasts. Upon applying techniques developed for the study of relative operating characteristic (ROC) curves, we find evidence that forecasts contain information with respect to the subsequent...

The paper assesses the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, across 48 contiguous states of the US, using recent advances in panel data techniques, given the existence of cross-sectional dependence, which in turn, makes reliance on time-series evidence biased. The Common...

One characteristic of many macroeconomic and financial time series is their asymmetric behaviour during different phases of a business cycle. Oil price shocks have been amongst those economic variables that have been identified in theoretical and empirical literature to predict the phases of...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between tourism activity and economic performance for G-7 countries. This paper attempts to answer two questions. Firstly, it will look at whether economic growth causes increased tourism activity for Italy, Canada, Japan, France, the UK, the...

The recent commodity price boom has spurred interest to understand determinants of commodity price movements. This paper investigates the causal relationship between oil prices and the prices of 25 other commodities, which include both metals and agricultural products, in the presence of...

This paper presents an analysis of ethanol-gasoline price ratio in Brazil from 2000 to 2012. Since 2008 Brazilian Government has artificially frozen gasoline prices while prices of ethanol to the consumer were still liberated. Considering that annual inflation in Brazil is around 5% per year and...

This paper makes use of two types of extreme value distributions, namely: the generalised extreme value distribution often referred to as the block of maxima method (BMM), and the peak-over-threshold method (POT) of the extreme value distributions, to model the financial tail risks associated...