This paper uses four ADF-type unit root tests and four KPSS-type stationarity tests to examine whether the gender unemployment gap would converge to zero in Africa. Among these different tests, the two most restricted models, namely the ADF test and the KPSS test, indicate no convergence in the...

This paper proposes a nonlinear unit root test based on the artificial neural network-augmented Dickey-Fuller (ANN-ADF) test for testing hysteresis in unemployment. In this new unit root test, the linear, quadratic and cubic components of the neural network process are used to capture the...

The study investigates the impact of uncertainties on energy pricing during the COVID-19 pandemic using five uncertainty measures that include the COVID-Induced Uncertainty (CIU), Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU), Global Fear Index (GFI); Volatility Index (VIX), and the Misinformation Index of...

We develop an index of uncertainty, the COVID-19 induced uncertainty (CIU) index, and employ it to empirically examine the vulnerability of energy prices amidst the COVID-19 pandemic using a distributed lag model that jointly accounts for conditional heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation,...

Extant literature establishes co-movements among commodity (metal and oil) prices; whereas oil price/shocks aggregate, as a lone predictor, has relative predictability for most financial assets. We assess the predictability of Baumeister and Hamilton's (2019) decomposed oil shocks (economic...

This paper deals with the analysis of long-run relationships of fear indices for US stocks, commodities, and the energy sector with global fear indices for stocks and oil. Departing from the classical literature, fractional integration, and cointegration techniques are used to determine the...

At the end of the 1990s, the Japanese government distributed annually more than US$10 billion as foreign aid directly or indirectly to developing countries. Japan’s ODA can be divided into the following four groups: 1) Bilateral Grants, 2) Technical Co-operation, 3) Multilateral Aid, and 4)...

West African countries have long advocated efforts to promote economic integration and income convergence. In recent trends, Nigeria records the highest GDP in nominal value, yet its neighbouring countries are yet to catch up in terms of both GDP growth rate and GDP per capita growth rate. The...

This paper proposes a new causality test or a Fisher-type causality test to examine empirically the export-growth nexus. To empirically demonstrate this new causality test procedure, the Fisher causality test is used to examine the exports-growth nexus in four Asian economies, namely Indonesia,...

This paper suggests a new testing procedure to systematically examine the middle-income trap (MIT). To empirically demonstrate this procedure, one high income and 14 middle-income countries are examined using newly developed unit root tests - Fourier ADF with structural break (FADF-SB) and...