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We address the importance of emerging market economies for the global economy by testing for volatility spillovers between the United States and a number of emerging market economies. We use the methodology recently introduced by Diebold and Yilmaz and daily data, over the period from December 8, 2011, to March 21, 2018, on exchange-traded funds (ETFs), retrieved from Yahoo! Finance, for seven emerging market countries—China, Colombia, Greece, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, and South Korea. We find statistically significant volatility spillovers from emerging market economies to the United States, meaning that the growth prospects of emerging market economies are becoming extremely relevant for global economic growth.JEL classification:E32, F20, F42

This ISCEF special issue of The Energy Journal presents new results in the area of energy economics to provide new insights on commodity markets, which will be helpful for investors, policymakers and analysts. In particular, this issue focuses on studies that use recent modeling techniques and empirical design. It introduces seven studies, presented at the fifth International Symposium in Computational Economics and Finance organized in Paris on April 12-14th, 2018 (www.iscef. com). These studies focus on the investigation of the dynamics of commodity markets, discuss the consequences of uncertainty on energy prices and their effects on the real economy and financial markets, and use high frequency data and recent econometric methods to empirically investigate the interactions between commodity markets and financial markets.

How does oil price uncertainty affect consumer sentiment in advanced economies? Is the response of consumer sentiment to exogenous positive and negative oil price shocks symmetric or asymmetric? Motivated to answer these questions, this paper provides a comprehensive examination of the effects of real oil price shocks on consumer sentiment in the G7 economies in the context of two classes of empirical models. With the application of a bivariate structural GARCH-in-Mean VAR model we find that (in general) oil price uncertainty has a negative and statistically significant effect on consumer sentiment in the G7 countries. Moreover, using a test of symmetry, we find that the relationship between oil prices and consumer sentiment is in general asymmetric.JEL Classification:C32, D12, Q43, O57

This paper revisits the empirical relationship between interest rates and money demand from a novel perspective, i.e., information theory. Particularly, we utilize the model-free transfer entropy to quantify the flow of information from interest rates to monetary aggregates and present three findings. First, we document a hump-shaped informational link between interest rate and M1 monetary aggregate, with a rounded high point in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Second, we identify three structural shifts in the information transmission from interest rate to M1. The first two breakpoints occurred in the early 1980s and mid-1990s, likely as a response to the removal of Regulation Q and the introduction of sweep technology, respectively. The third shift took place during the relatively less-explored period of the early 2000s. Finally, we unravel a previously unreported pivotal distinction between the first two changepoints despite the apparent similarity in inducing money demand instability: the 1980s financial deregulations facilitate the transmission of information, whereas the 1990s financial reforms acted as an impediment to the information flow. Our results are robust to alternative entropy measures.

Energy security, climate change, and growing energy demand issues are moving up on the global political agenda, and contribute to the rapid growth of the renewable energy sector. In this paper we investigate the effects of oil price shocks, and also of uncertainty about oil prices, on the stock returns of clean energy and technology companies. In doing so, we use monthly data that span the period from May 1983 to December 2016, and a bivariate structural VAR model that is modified to accommodate GARCH-in-mean errors. Moreover, we examine the asymmetry of stock responses to oil price shocks of different sizes, with and without oil price uncertainty. Our evidence indicates that oil price uncertainty has no statistically significant effect on stock returns, and that the relationship between oil prices and stock returns is symmetric. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications and stock prices of clean energy companies.

We investigate the demand for energy and the degree of substitutability among fossil fuels in the United States using the Normalized Quadratic (NQ) expenditure function and (to our knowledge) the longest span prices and quantities that have ever been studied before, from 1919 to 2012. In doing so, we merge the empirical energy demand systems literature with the recent financial econometrics literature, relaxing the homoskedasticity assumption and instead assuming that the covariance matrix of the errors of the flexible demand system is time-varying. We generate inference, in terms of a full set of elasticities, consistent with neoclassical microeconomic theory and the data generating process. Our results are in line with earlier findings in the literature based on shorter duration samples and different methodologies. They have important implications for climate policy intervention designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We show that there is a small but statistically significant substitution possibility between crude oil and natural gas, but not between crude oil and coal. We also provide evidence that natural gas is a substitute for coal when the price of coal changes, but coal is not a substitute for natural gas when the price of natural gas changes.

This paper focuses on the aggregate demand for electricity, natural gas, and light fuel oil in Canada as a whole and six of its provinces—Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia—in the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. We employ the locally flexible normalized quadratic (NQ) expenditure function (in the case of the residential sector) and the NQ cost function (in the case of the commercial and industrial sectors), treat the curvature property as a maintained hypothesis, and provide evidence consistent with neoclassical microeconomic theory. We find that the Morishima interfuel elasticities of substitution are in general positive and statistically significant. Our results indicate limited substitutability between electricity and natural gas, but strong substitutability between light fuel oil and each of electricity and natural gas in most cases.

In this paper, we use a cross bicorrelation test to study the relationship between the real price of oil and industrial production in the United States. We find evidence of nonlinearity, for different window frames, over the period from February 1974 to May 2013. Interestingly we find evidence of nonlinearity in two periods that coincide with periods of economic or political instability. Furthermore, we find that in both cases the price of oil leads U.S. industrial production. These findings are important, because they complement the existing literature regarding the existence of a nonlinear and asymmetric relationship between the oil price and economic activity.

A growing interest in energy efficiency and energy saving from academic researchers and practitioners is notable in many emerging economies, including Russia. Social barriers hinder the transition toward a more energy-efficient economy in the residential sector and for small businesses because of negligence for new energy-efficient technologies, whereas in large corporations, managers’ and employees’ opportunistic behavior in the management system creates social barriers. This study contributes to the literature by suggesting an approach to study social barriers for energy efficiency longitudinally through a mixed survey of small groups from the same social strata. We evaluated the method proposed in Russia between 2013 and 2019. Each year, the authors surveyed respondents ranging from 94 to 120 (751 respondents in total), employing a method described in the Krasnodar Krai of Northern Caucasus (Krasnodar Territory). The study reveals formidable knowledge barriers and no evidence of positive dynamics. To overcome these barriers, companies need to introduce internal educational policies to introduce energy management systems. The authors present results and conclusions that can help foster similar research programs in transition economies and help to avoid common mistakes while setting up state energy efficiency and conservation policies.

We estimate a bivariate GARCH-in-Mean VAR with a BEKK variance specification, to investigate whether oil price volatility affects real economic activity. We use the same data set of thirty seven, aggregate and disaggregate, industrial production indices used by Herrera et al. (2011) as a proxy for real output and a post-1973 data sample. We check the robustness of our results by using two proxies for the price of oil, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil price and the Refiners’ Acquisition Cost (RAC) of crude oil, and by testing for both nominal and real effects. We find significant evidence of nonlinearities for both aggregate and disaggregate indices. Our research highlights the importance of nominal prices and extreme events such as the Great Recession in the transmission of nonlinearities. Our results show that nonlinear impacts of the price of oil on the aggregate economy vary according to time period even within the post-1974 data. Since 2000, oil price volatility is up markedly, but the number of industries it impacts is down when compared with the full sample. This is in keeping with what one would expect, based on trend improvements in GDP per unit of energy use. However, for those series, where oil price volatility is significant, the impact of oil volatility is substantially higher than in the full sample; this runs contrary to what one might expect from the observed GDP per unit of energy use improvements.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between the real price of oil and industrial production for the G-7 countries, using post-1973 data. We test whether the relationship between industrial production and the real price of oil is symmetric using slope-based tests as well as tests of the null hypothesis of symmetric impulse responses. Based on the impulse response function tests, we find that for France and the United Kingdom the response of the industrial production growth rate to positive and negative oil price shocks is symmetric, for Canada, Germany, Italy, and Japan it is (in general) asymmetric at almost all horizons for both small and large oil price shocks, and for the United States it is symmetric at all horizons for small shocks but asymmetric at all horizons for large shocks.

In this paper, we use recent advances in the financial econometrics literature to model the time-varying conditional variance in five energy markets – crude oil, gasoline, heating oil, propane, and natural gas – using daily data over the period from January 3, 1994 to September 23, 2008. We estimate autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) and generalised ARCH (GARCH) models using a variety of error densities (the normal, Student-t, and generalised error distribution) and diagnostic checks. We use the models to perform static and dynamic forecasts over different horizons and compare their performance to that of a random walk model.

This paper estimates interfuel substitution elasticities in selected developing and industrialized economies at the sector level. In doing so, it employs state-of-the-art techniques in microeconometrics, particularly the locally flexible normalized quadratic functional form, and provides evidence consistent with neoclassical microeconomic theory. The results indicate that the interfuel substitution elasticities are consistently below unity, revealing the limited ability to substitute between major energy commodities (i.e., coal, oil, gas, and electricity). We find that on average, industrial and residential sectors tend to exhibit higher potential for substitution between energy inputs as compared to the electricity generation and transportation sectors in all countries, with the United States being the only exception. In addition, we find that developed countries demonstrate higher potential for interfuel substitution in their industrial and transportation sectors as compared to the developing economies. The implication is that interfuel substitution depends on the structure of the economy, not the level of economic development. Moreover, higher changes in relative prices are needed than what we have already experienced to induce switching toward a lower carbon economy.

We investigate interfuel substitution using the Minflex Laurent flexible demand system and a more flexible copula estimation approach. In doing so, we relax the joint normality assumption of the errors of the demand system and estimate the model without having to delete one equation as is usually the practice under the assumption of jointly normally distributed errors. The results indicate that the short-run Morishima elasticities of substitution among crude oil, natural gas, and coal are small, implying that one fuel has hardly utilized to substitute for another fuel.

This paper extends the work in Serletis [Serletis, A. (1992). Unit root behavior in energy futures prices. The Energy Journal 13, 119–128] by re-examining the empirical evidence for random walk type behavior in energy futures prices. It tests for fractional integrating dynamics in energy futures markets utilizing more recent data (from January 3, 1994 to June 30, 2005) and a new semi-parametric wavelet-based estimator, which is superior to the more prevalent GPH estimator (on the basis of Monte-Carlo evidence). We find new evidence that energy prices display long memory and that the particular form of long memory is anti-persistence, characterized by the variance of each series being dominated by high frequency (low wavelet scale) components.

This paper aims to investigate the informational efficiency of the Alberta electricity market and also the issue of whether interchange transactions (power flows between markets) are becoming increasingly significant factors in electric power markets. In doing so, we use hourly data for all hours, peak hours, and off-peak hours over the period from January 1st, 1999 to July 31st, 2005. In testing the efficiency of the Alberta power market, we use a statistical physics approach - namely the ‘detrending moving average (DMA)’ technique, introduced by Alessio et al. (2002) and further developed by Carbone et al. (2004a, 2004b), and recently applied to energy futures markets by Serletis and Rosenberg (2007). In analyzing the relationship between power imports and exports and pool prices, we assess whether regulatory changes have modified the causal relationship between import/export volumes and the pool price. According to our results, the electricity market in Alberta is highly inefficient and cross-border trade of electricity between Alberta and neighbouring jurisdictions helps predict the price dynamics in Alberta’s electricity market.

In this paper we build on recent empirical work and investigate the sources of finance for physical investment in Canada. We provide a set of data on the patterns of finance to enable consistent international comparisons and use two methods of measuring financing patterns (both using flow-of-funds data based on the national income accounts)—the net flows approach of Corbett and Jenkinson (1996, 1997) and the gross flows approach of Hackethal and Schmidt (2003). We find evidence to support the view that internal finance is the dominant mode of finance and that the pattern of finance in Canada is very similar to financing patterns in other countries, consistent with the findings by Mayer (1990)and Corbett and Jenkinson (1997).

In this paper we test for deterministic chaos (i.e., nonlinear deterministic processes which look random) in seven Mont Belview, Texas, hydrocarbon markets, using monthly data from 1985:1 to 1996:12--the markets are those of ethane, propane, normal butane, iso-butane, naptha, crude oil, and natural gas. In doing so, we use the Lyapunov exponent estimator of Nychka, Ellner, Gallant, and McCaffrey (1992). We conclude that there is evidence, consistent with a chaotic nonlinear generation process in all five natural gas liquids markets.

The objective of this article is to test statistically in the Granger-Sims sense for the existence of causality between government expenditure and gross domestic product (GDP) in Canada over the period 1947 to 1986. From a brief examination of the prevalent theories of government growth, Wagner's law emerges as the most comprehensive hypothesis and is subsequently subjected to causality tests. Unequivocally, Wagner's law is rejected, but the reverse causality, which runs from government spending to GDP, is rejected as well, thus contradicting the claims of effective fiscal activism that emanate from the Keynesian paradigm. These results are indicative of the complexity of forces that influence government behavior and should be viewed not negatively, but rather as a challenge for more imaginative future research in this highly important area.

Maximum Likelihood Cointegration Tests of Purchasing Power Parity: Evidence from Seventeen OECD Countries. — This paper examines the relevance of long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) during the recent floating exchange rate period, using Johansen’s maximum likelihood method for estimating and testing steady-state relations in multivariate vector autoregressive models. Thirty-two bilateral intercountry relations are considered and it is found that in many cases there exists a long-run relationship between exchange rates and international price differentials, which, however, significantly deviates from PPP in most instances. Kointegrationstest der Kaufkraftparität nach der Maximum-Likelihood-Methode: Evidenz von 17 OECD-Ländern. — Der Verfasser untersucht die Bedeutung der langfristigen Kaufkraftparität während der letzten Periode floatender Wechselkurse und verwendet dabei Johansen's Maximum-Likelihood-Methode für die Schätzung und Prüfung von Gleichgewichtsrelationen in multivariaten vektor-autoregressiven Modellen. Er untersucht 32 bilaterale Beziehungen zwischen den Ländern und kommt zu dem Ergebnis, daß in vielen Fällen eine langfristige Beziehung zwischen Wechselkursen und internationalen Preisdifferentialen besteht, die aber in den meisten Fällen von der Kaufkraftparität in signifikanter Weise abweicht.

In this paper we test for deterministic chaos in seven East European black market exchange rates, using Koedijk and Kool's (1992, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 10, 83-96) monthly data from January 1955 through May 1990. In doing so we use three (non-parametric) inference methods, the BDS (Brocket al., 1996, Econometric Reviews, 15, 197-235) test for whiteness, the Lyapunov exponent estimator of Nychkaet al.(1992, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 12, 135-136) as well as the Lyapunov exponent estimator of Gencay and Dechert (1992, Physica D, 59, 142-157). We find some consistency in inference across methods, and we conclude, based on the Nychkaet al.(1992) estimator, that there is evidence consistent with a chaotic non-linear generation process in only two out of seven series.

This paper considers a nonborrowed-monetary-base VAR and a targets and instrument framework favored by the monetarists to resolve the puzzles thrown up by monetary VAR studies. The results show that nonborrowed-monetary-base shocks produce responses consistent with a priori expectations about the effects of monetary policy on interest rates, prices, and output.

This paper tests the causal relationship between the international indebtedness in the 1970s which was followed by the debt crisis in the 1980s and the import and export flows of developing countries. In the overwhelming majority of cases from a sample of 55 countries facing debt difficulties no evidence of causality was found from indebtedness alone or from its combination with exports to imports, nor from indebtedness to exports. These findings cast serious doubts as to whether the inflows of foreign funds contributed to the economic development or the export orientation of debtor nations. [O1, F34]