At the moment Israel is facing the worst water supply crisis since the beginning of record keeping more than 80 years ago. The Israeli National Water Authority (NWA) declared recently that drought conditions are continuing for eight consecutive years now (Jerusalem Post, 2012). This, together...

CGE models usually assume extremes of factor mobility: factors either move between industries without cost or they do not move at all. With the assumption of mobile factors, simulations lead to reallocation of factors among different sectors of the economy which often vary strongly in factor...

1 Introduction In 2009, major offshore natural gas deposits were discovered in Israel after historically being an energy-poor state relying on imported fossil fuels to meet its energy needs, and an energy island that is disconnected from energy infrastructure in the region, with the exception of...

One of the advantages to analyze the economic links between two countries on the basis of stock market data, rather than aggregate economic data published by national statistical offices, is that stock market data are readily available, allowing analysis in almost real time. We consider a...

A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is a comprehensive, economy-wide data framework of real accounts, typically representing the economy of a nation but also providing the link between the economy and the rest of the world in terms of trade flows. However, in order to have complete picture of the...

The dating of cyclical phenomena in economies, such as business cycles, is at the core of economic policy research. Moreover, policy decisions which are due to affect interacting economies should take into account the economies' connectedness and synchronicity. The cross-country analysis of...

The standard vector error correction (VEC) model assumes the iid normal distribution of disturbance term in the model. This paper extends this assumption to include GARCH process. We call this model as VEC-GARCH model. However as the number of parameters in a VEC-GARCH model is large, the...

Investigate how retail investors determine their stock trading through experience to achieve the desired portfolio returns. To examine how retail investors coordinate their expected returns and perceived risk. Verify how retail investors’ trade potentials augment transactions on the stock...

This paper evaluates if and how speculation affects the volatility of commodity futures: it distinguishes between short term and long term measures of speculation and investigates if the impact on volatility is different. Speculation is measured by means of four indexes: scalping, Working’s T,...

In a recent line of research the low interest-rate environment of the early to mid 2000s is viewed as an element that triggered increased risk-taking appetite of banks in search for yield. This paper uses approximately 7,000 annual observations on banks of the CEE countries over the period...