We empirically investigate whether the relationship between interest rates and public deficits/debt may be nonlinear for the U.S. Using threshold estimation, we find evidence of level-dependent effects on interest rates, implying a significant effect of projected deficits and debt in the U.S....

Obtaining reliable estimates of the volatility of interest rates and exchange rates is a necessary condition to evaluate issues related to monetary independence and fear of floating. In this paper we use methods which explicitly account for structural breaks in the volatility dynamics in order...

In this paper we put forward a Bayesian Model Averaging method dealing with model uncertainty in the presence of potential spatial autocorrelation. The method uses spatial filtering in order to account for different types of spatial links. We contribute to existing methods that handle spatial...

We propose exploiting the term structure of relative interest rates to obtain estimates of changes in the timing of a currency crisis as perceived by market participants. Our indicator can be used to evaluate the relative probability of a crisis occurring in one week as compared to a crisis...

Panel data is used to investigate the extent of R&D spillovers between OECD countries, and the importance of barriers to technology adoption in affecting the benefits of such spillovers. Our results indicate that countries with less regulated goods and labour markets benefit more from foreign R&D.

This paper develops a simple model that analyses the relationship between a country?s oil endowment and the duration of its autocratic leader. The dictator uses the rents from oil extraction for both personal gain and to pay-off potential opposition and chooses an optimal level of oil...

We tackle explicitly the issue of model uncertainty in the framework of binary variable models of currency crises. Using Bayesian model averaging techniques, we assess the robustness of the explanatory variables proposed in the recent literature for both static and dynamic models. Our results...

We use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to evaluate the robustness of determinants of economic growth in a new dataset of 255 European regions in the 1995-2005 period. We use three different specifications based on (1) the cross-section of regions, (2) the cross-section of regions with country...

We propose a new time series model aimed at forecasting crude oil prices. The proposed specification is an unobserved components model with an asymmetric cyclical component. The asymmetric cycle is defined as a sine-cosine wave where the frequency of the cycle depends on past oil price...

If oil exporters stabilize the purchasing power of their export revenues in terms of imports, exchange rate developments (and particularly, developments in the US dollar/euro exchange rate) may contain information about oil price changes. This hypothesis depends on three conditions: (a) OPEC has...