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The purpose of this paper is to investigate causal relations between the insurance market development and economic growth in ten transition European Union member countries in the period between 1993 and 2013. The analysis is conduced with the use of bootstrap panel causality approach proposed by Konya (2006), which allows for simultaneous inclusion of both cross-sectional dependence and country-specific heterogeneity. Various types of dependencies between economic growth and the insurance market development (both in terms of the global insurance market and in the division into life insurance and non-life insurance) are identified in the study, and these findings confirm the results obtained in the majority of other papers, which report differences in the role of insurance and benefits various economies derive from the insurance market.

The aim of this study is to investigate sources of food prices volatility. The analysis uses daily series for volatility of corn, soybean, wheat, rice, US dollar, crude oil, and SP500 futures spanning the period January 4, 2000 to April 1, 2017. The authors employ the generalized vector autoregressive framework in rolling sample approach in order to capture the time-varying nature of volatility spillovers. The results reveal that: volatility spillovers measures change over time; most of the volatility spillovers are observed within the two groups of markets: food markets and “non-food” markets; corn market is net volatility transmitter.

The paper presents a detailed analysis of relationships between steam coal prices on the Atlantic and Pacific basins. The division took into account both the importers (Japan, Europe) and the exporters (South Africa and Australia). The data used in the analysis came from Argus Base and included time series from the period January 2002–August 2011. The analysis has revealed that there is a cointegration between the prices, which means that they are in a long-term equilibrium. The application of the Granger causality test has shown that the Pacific basin plays a dominant role in the process of shaping prices. Both the import prices and the pair Japan and Australia were causes for the remaining prices. Instantaneous causality was calculated using the directed acyclic graph (DAG) method. The results obtained indicate that there is no instantaneous causality for the pair of importers in Asia and Europe. The structural restrictions for the model yielded the impulse response function. All the analyses co...

The objective of the paper is to analyse causality between the prices of corn, crude oil and ethanol. The analysis conducted for the paper is a dynamic one, and the data used consist of weekly futures prices of crude oil, corn, and ethanol from January 5, 2007 till April 11, 2014. The assessment of causal links between the prices of corn, crude oil and ethanol is carried out with the use of rolling regression applied to the augmented-VAR framework proposed by Toda and Yamamoto in 1995. The application of the rolling regression procedures in the modified Wald (MWALD) causality test allows for the investigation of the persistence of stability in causal relations between the prices analysed. The results obtained indicate that the linkages between energy prices and agricultural commodity prices changed in the period analysed. The results of Granger causality tests reveal that in the analysed period the price of corn influences the price of energy (crude oil and ethanol). Also, crude oil prices influence corn prices and ethanol prices. However, ethanol prices were not observed to influence crude oil prices or corn prices.

The aim of the paper is to assess linkages between energy consumption and economic growth in the light of compliance with the EU energy policy targets stated in the climate and energy package for 2020 in the European Union member states in the period 1993–2011. The study is divided into two main stages. During the first one, using cluster analysis methods, four groups of countries which met three energy policy targets stated in the package at similar levels were identified. During the second stage, the bootstrap Granger panel causality approach proposed by Konya (2006) was used to verify the hypothesis of causality between energy consumption and economic growth in the countries from four groups created in the previous step. The global financial crisis was also taken into account. The results obtained reveal that the level of compliance with energy policy targets influences linkages between energy consumption and economic growth. The results indicate causal relations in the group of countries with the greatest reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the highest reduction of energy intensity and the highest share of renewable energy consumption in total energy consumption. In the remaining groups the results mostly confirm the neutrality hypothesis.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the integration of the steam coal market. The analysis of dependencies between mean rates of return of prices on the steam coal market and volatility spillover was conducted using weekly data from the period 04.01.2002 to 30.12.2011. The prices of the world's largest exporters and importers on the Pacific and Atlantic markets were chosen to analyse the dependencies. The methodology was based on the tests from Cheung and Ng (1996) and Hong (2001) , which allow for the analysis of Granger causality both in mean and in variance. The analyses indicate that the dependence between participants is not the same. The strongest links were observed between the pairs of participants from the same market (that is, either the Atlantic market or the Pacific market), and the price of Australian coal turned out to be the most important factor in shaping other prices on the Pacific market. On the Atlantic market, the coal prices in the Amsterdam–Rotterdam–Antwerp (ARA) ports and the Richards Bay port had the greatest influence on coal prices and were the Granger cause of prices in the Pacific region.

The article investigates causality between fossil fuel prices, exchange rates and the German Stock Index (DAX). The analysis is conducted dynamically with the use of rolling VAR methodology on the basis of weekly data from the period October 2001–June 2012. The results obtained show that the relationship between the variables changed over time depending on the level of volatility in financial markets.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the conditional dependence structure between precious metal returns using a copula-DCC-GARCH approach. Conditional correlation matrices are used to identify the states of the precious metals market by assuming that a given state of the market corresponds to a typical pattern of the conditional dependence structure. Cluster analysis allows for pointing at transition points between the market states, that is the points of drastic change in the conditional dependence structure. The application of the methodology described above to the period between 1997 and 2013 indicates three market states of four major precious metals (gold, silver, platinum and palladium). The results obtained reveal a sudden increase in dependencies between precious metals at the turn of April and May 2004.

The aim of this paper is to identify Granger causality between energy consumption and economic growth in post-communist countries in the period 1993 to 2011. Bootstrap panel Granger causality test was used as a research tool in order to accommodate for countryspecific heterogeneity and to avoid the problem of cross-sectional dependence. The analysis allowed for the verification of the hypothesis regarding the links between economic growth and energy consumption in nine countries. The hypotheses were confirmed: the growth hypothesis in three countries and the feedback hypothesis in one country.