Theory suggests that commodity futures price levels and returns data may exhibit both nonlinear and nonreversible features. This paper attempts to provide a thorough empiri- cally investigation of these claims. The data set is composed of 25 individual continuous contract commodity futures...

One of the greatest concerns of this age is finding definitive ways to curb the loss of biodiversity. Although there have been growing calls on biodiversity protection and conservation by governments and institutions, the challenge lies on fitting models that best explain the trends of target...

This paper examines how energy-output ratios in Fiji have responded to the energy crises and in particular if they have declined after the shocks. The expectation is that energy efficiency should improve after the oil shocks. For this purpose we used at first a few simpler procedures and then...

The Department of Finance employs extensively a large macroeconomic model of the Canadian economy -- the QFS model(Quarterly Forecasting and Simulation Model) -- for economic and fiscal forecasting and simulation exercises. As with any large macroeconomic model, and particularly one that plays a...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

Macroeconomic practitioners frequently work with multivariate time series models such as VARs, factor augmented VARs as well as time-varying parameter versions of these models (including variants with multivariate stochastic volatility). These models have a large number of parameters and, thus,...

In the paper model of macroeconomic turnover and its possibilities for investments modelling are shown. The model consists from four blocks: in the first the theoretical model is described. In the second the model is reflected in accordance with the requirements of system dynamics method, there...

This paper tests for a sulfur Kuznets curve by examining the sulfur emissions per capita-GDP per capita relationship individually, for 25 OECD countries over 1950-2005 using a reduced-form, linear model that allows for multiple endogenously determined breaks. This approach addresses several...

In the past decades, there has been an unprecedented increase in cross border transactions between countries in terms of goods and financial flows. This integration has been fuelled by search of lower risk investments, risk diversification, search for cost effective and more efficient factors of...

Some of the most widely used models in economics are based on variables not yet observed, and their specification depends on future observations; the theory that underpins these delivers the backward/ forward solution. We present a newly unified construction, starting with a more general...