The general concern on the environmental implications of the rising demand for coal registered in China during the last few years has induced considerable research effort to produce accurate forecasts of China's energy requirements. Nevertheless, no previous study has modelled the coal demand in...

In this paper we discuss a simple econometric strategy for pricing and hedging illiquid financial products, such as the Japanese crude oil cocktail (JCC) index, the most popular OTC energy derivative in Japan. First, we review the existing literature for computing optimal hedge ratios (OHR) and...

The relevance of oil in the world economy explains why considerable effort has been devoted to the development of different types of econometric models for oil price forecasting. Several specifications have been proposed in the economic literature. Some are based on financial theory and...

The empirical literature is very far from any consensus about the appropriate model for oil price forecasting that should be implemented. Relative to the previous literature, this paper is novel in several respects. First of all, we test and systematically evaluate the ability of several...

The role of speculators in the oil markets has been vastly investigated during the last few years. Several authors focused on the definition of speculation while others examined the relationship between oil prices and the behavior of trading actors. In this paper, we formulate a new theory able...

A number of factors contribute to interstate conflicts. One social element that has received little attention in the literature is the role of international migration. At the same time, the contribution of climate stress on interstate disputes has been underresearched. This paper analyses if...

The way we collectively discuss migration shapes citizens' perceptions of migrants and their influence on our society. This paper investigates whether a narrative about the positive impact of immigrants on the hosting economy affects natives' behaviour towards migrants. To shed light on the...

We study out-group biases in attitudes toward refugees, and the effect of European Union (EU) immigration policies on these views, using an online survey experiment including 4,087 Italian participants. We assess attitudes using donations to a randomly assigned group: Italian victims of violence...

The present paper analyses the expenditure behavior of Albanian families. The objective is to cast some light upon the relationship between education expenditure and the volume of remittances, sent from abroad by household members. To assess the existence of an education enhancing effect of...