Search

The interconnections within food, biofuel and fossil fuel markets are first described in the context of biofuels technologies and economic policy framework. Consequently, the econometric analysis consisting of Johansen cointegration, error correction model, vector autoregression and Granger causality is applied to price series of 12 biofuel related commodities. While a number of equilibrium relationships are found across the examined markets suggesting their interconnection, we do not obtain a persuasive confirmation of the thesis that biofuels clearly lead to food shortages via the increase in prices of basic food commodities used in the production of biofuels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a new measure of capital market efficiency. For its construction, we use the approaches of fractal dimension, Hurst exponent and entropy. The method is applied on 41 stock indices from the beginning of 2000 till the end of August 2011 and interesting results are found -- the analyzed indices are not self-affine; for the majority of indices, the deviation from the efficient market is dominated by local inefficiencies; and the most efficient capital markets are the stock indices of the most developed countries (FTSE, SPX, NIKKEI and DAX). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-term memory processes have been extensively examined in recent literature as they provide simple way to test for predictabilty in the underlying process. However, most of the literature interprets the results of estimated Hurst exponent simply by its comparison to its asymptotic limit of 0 5. Therefore, we use moving block bootstrap method for rescaled range and periodogram method. In our analysis of evolution of Hurst exponent between 1997 and 2009, we show that PX experienced persistent behavior which weakened in time Nevertheless, the returns of PX remain close to confidence interval separating independent and persistent behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]