Displaying from 11 to 20 of 293 available piece of news
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Trade Costs and the Integration of British West Africa in the Global Economy
Despite the essential role of trade for African economies, in the extensive literature on the historical evolution of international trade costs, Africa is still missing. In this article, we contribute to filling this gap by (1) providing the first estimates of British West Africa's trade costs with Britain c. 1840-1940 by computing relative price gaps in a representative sample of African export and European import prices, and (2) analysing the main determinants of trade costs trends, by regressing price gaps on measures of transport costs, market efficiency, and trade barriers.
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The shipping industry under the EU Green Deal
In 2021, the European Commission unveiled the 'Fit for 55' package, part of the European Green Deal aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Central to this initiative is extending the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) to include the shipping industry, which contributes significantly to the EU's emissions.
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Financing patterns of working capital and physical investment
Firms must access financial markets to surpass financial barriers limiting innovation activities. However, an overreliance on debt might moderate creativity and innovativeness. From a sample of European manufacturing firms, and applying a system of equations using GSEM, we derive a function to determine the thresholds of the optimal acquisition of working capital and physical investment. Contrasting this information with the descriptive data, firms tend to under-finance working capital, as future short-term needs are more challenging to identify when designing investment plans. Additionally, we find evidence for the heterogeneous financial needs of firms operating in high-tech as compared to low-tech sectors, as well as other differences related to firm age.
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Unraveling the structural sources of oil production and their impact on CO2 emissions
This study is the first to present an explicit view of the structural determinants of oil production across the short-, medium-, and long-term. The analysis relies on a structural vector autoregressive model utilizing a purely agnostic and ICA-based identification approach. The results, obtained from impulse response functions, estimated oil supply and demand elasticities, the decomposition of forecast error variances, and the historical decomposition of oil production, all indicate that, over the past five decades, changes in crude oil demand have had only minor impacts on the actual level of oil production. Local projections of global CO2 emissions on annualized oil market shocks reveal that only supply and aggregate demand shocks have impacted on CO2 emissions, while oil-specific demand shocks did not exert any significant influence.
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Service-quality and pricing strategies in the airline industry: The role of distance
This paper analyzes airlines' fare and frequency decisions, both theoretically and empirically. These decisions depend on route distance, as only short-haul routes are affected by intermodal competition from personal transportation. Although fares increase with distance both on short- and long-haul routes, the effect of distance on frequencies depends on the presence of intermodal competition.
Frequencies decay with distance on long-haul routes. However, on short-haul routes, frequencies increase with distance because airlines try to boost profits by attracting demand from other transportation modes. Finally, on short-haul routes, intermodal competition from personal transportation affects more intensively network carriers than low-cost carriers as distance rises, which produces an increased differentiation between both types of airlines.
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Beyond trade statistics: how much do exports actually contribute to domestic value added?
Koopman et al. (2014) and Los et al. (2016) decomposed gross exports into various value added components by adopting the input-output assumption of disconnection between production and final demand. Such an assumption, however, neglects the ability of production inflows to generate income and consumption, and therefore additional impacts on production. To achieve a more complete understanding of the role played by trade, this article presents a method for quantifying the value added of exports that reflects the linkages between production and private consumption. In the tradition of Miyazawa (1968, 1976) and Sonis and Hewings (1973), the proposed model endogenously defines household consumption in the output determination, thus improving the way in which the interdependencies between income and output generation processes are revealed. The proposal is directly applicable empirically through available world trade databases.
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The Constrained Equal Losses family of rules for claims problems
In this study, we introduce a family of rules for claims problems called the CEL-family. The family is defined by means of a parameter theta in [0,1] as a notion of solidarity and contribution. It contains the Constrained equal losses and the Constrained equal awards rules. We perform an axiomatic analysis considering the main properties in the literature, for the sake of comparison. We apply the family to the distribution of the European Regional Development Funds to study how the rules in the family treat regions with relatively smaller claims compared to regions with relatively larger claims.
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Spatial patterns of built structures co-determine nations’ level of resource demand
While it's known that the layout of cities affects their resource use, the role of settlement and infrastructure patterns in determining national-level material use hasn't been explored due to a lack of data. This study systematically examines a wide range of drivers influencing national per-capita material demand, considering both production- and consumption-based indicators. Alongside traditional indicators like GDP, the analysis introduces eight new indicators representing the extent and patterns of settlements and transport infrastructure in each country. Covering 123 countries with 91% of the world's population and 92% of global GDP, the study reveals that built structures significantly influence resource use. Material stock pattern indicators provide substantial additional insights beyond GDP and other usual indicators. The area of built-up land per capita stands out as a particularly strong predictor, suggesting it deserves attention in sustainability strategies.
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Quantifying the Covid-19 Shock in Cryptocurrencies
The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on the global economy, and the cryptocurrency market was not immune to its effects. This study delves into the changes experienced by leading cryptocurrencies during this period, examining their volatility and correlation dynamics.
We analyzed daily volatility in price and volume for the top seven cryptocurrencies by means of the Multifractal Detrended Cross-Correlation (MF-DCCA). Our findings reveal a consistent multifractal behavior for these volatility pairs, indicating that their fluctuations exhibit a self-similar structure across different time scales.
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Dependence structure between NFT, DeFi and cryptocurrencies in turbulent times
This research delves into the interconnectivity among 18 different types of cryptocurrencies, including NFTs, DeFi tokens, gold-backed cryptocurrencies, and traditional cryptocurrencies. We also calculated the optimal hedging ratio for each pair of cryptocurrencies and assessed their effectiveness in hedging against market fluctuations.
