In addition to quantitative assessment of economic growth using econometric models, business cycle analyses have been proved to be helpful to practitioners in order to assess current economic conditions or to anticipate upcoming fluctuations. In this paper, we focus on the acceleration cycle in...

The carry trade is the investment strategy of going long in high-yield target currencies and short in low-yield funding currencies. Recently, this naive trade has seen very high returns for long periods, followed by large crash losses after large depreciations of the target currencies. Based on...

We study a model of film production, distribution and consumption. The studio can release two goods, a theatrical and a video version, and has to decide on its versioning and sequencing strategy. In contrast with the previous literature, we allow for the possibility that consumers watch both...

This paper studies learning effects in new markets using a panel of relationships between Chilean wineries and distributors in the UK. Controlling for winery, distributors and time effects, FOB prices increase by at least three percent with every additional year in a relationship while export...

In an earlier paper "Granger-causality and Policy Effectiveness" Economica (1984), I showed that for a policy instrument x to Granger-cause some target variable y it is not necessary for x to be useful in controlling y. (The argument that it is not sufficient was already familiar, e.g. from the...

It is well known that temporal aggregation has adverse effects on Granger causality tests. Time series are often sampled at different frequencies. This is typically ignored, and data are merely aggregated to the common lowest frequency. We develop a set of Granger causality tests that explicitly...

This paper studies the dynamics of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since the outbreak of the Second (or 'Al-Aqsa') Intifada in September 2000, during which more than 3,300 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis have been killed. The conflict has followed an uneven pattern, with...

Recent empirical tests of dynamic optimal seigniorage models focus on their `smoothing' and long-run implications. The models also imply that the optimal policies are forward looking; that is seigniorage revenues depend on expected future government expenditures. We report causality tests of...

The Paper presents a model in which the exogenous money supply causes changes in the inflation rate and the output growth rate. While inflation and growth rate changes occur simultaneously, the inflation acts as a tax on the return to human capital and in this sense induces the growth rate...

Although recent research has repeatedly found a negative association between investment and political instability, the existence and direction of causality between these two variables has not yet been investigated. This paper empirically tests for such a causal and negative long-run relationship...