This paper takes a closer look at the puzzle uncovered by Driesprong et al. (2008) and finds empirical support for the "oil effect" in equity returns. Using forty nine US industry-level returns series and changes in oil spot and future prices, we address whether industry-level returns are...

This paper considers a Hotelling duopoly with two firms A and B in the final good market. Both A and $B$ can produce the required intermediate good, firm B having a lower cost due to a superior technology. We compare two contracts: outsourcing (A orders the intermediate good from B) and...

We review and model the impact of the internet on the production and uptake of high- quality news. Our review of trends in the market for news suggests 3 stylized facts: i) particular quality news markets are dominated by merely a few providers, ii) demand for quality news appears stable, but...

This paper analyzes the impact of vertical integration on product quality. Contrary to previous findings, it is shown that integration decreases quality in many natural situations. In general, the direction of the quality change is governed by three effects that are isolated in the model. This...

Prior to the Asian crisis, benign liquidity conditions contributed to credit expansion and overinvestment in the East Asian economies until they were hit by a deep recession (Saxena and Wong 2002). Similarly to the developments in the tiger economies in the nineties, the CEE economies grew...

We give a direct proof of the Harnack inequality for a class of Kolmogorov operators associated with a linear SDE and we find the explicit expression of the optimal Harnack constant. We discuss some possible implication of the Harnack inequality in finance: specifically we infer no-arbitrage...

According to Kaldor (1970), regional growth patterns arise from a cumulative causation process as broadly combining two substantial mechanisms i.e. a productivity regime, known as the “Kaldor-Verdoorn” law, and a demand regime due to the expansion of exportations. This paper attempts to...

Democratic decentralization in the state of West Bengal, of its own, are not producing systems that are more effective or more accountable to local needs and interests. The formal mechanisms matter less than the informal institutions that underpin local political economies. And the understanding...

A pervasive trend that characterised the past two decades of European economic growth is that the share in the economy of commercial services, and particularly business services, grows monotonically, and this mainly to the expense of the manufacturing sector. The structural shift reflects a...

Estimation of spatial housing price indices requires a housing market segmentation into local sub-markets. In this paper, we use geographically weighted regression model (GWR) to take account for spatial heterogeneity of housing attribute marginal prices. Estimated marginal prices are then used...