Emmanouil Trachanas

Price transmission in the international skim milk powder markets

ABSTRACT This article investigates the strength and the pattern of spatial price linkages in skimmed milk powder markets using monthly wholesale price data from three major producers and exporters (the U.S.A., the E.U., and Oceania) and the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model. The results suggest that prices in the three regions considered are linked with stable long-run relationships. The law of one price, however, does not hold. The dominant pattern of transmission in the long run is asymmetric involving positive price stocks to be transmitted with higher intensity compared to negative prices shocks; asymmetries in price transmission exist in the short run as well.

Is the Greek budget deficit sustainable after all? Empirical evidence accounting for regime shifts

This article re-examines the sustainability of the Greek budget deficit by using a formal framework based on the government’s intertemporal budget constraint. The empirical analysis uses annual data from 1960 to 2011 and employs traditional as well as more recent unit root and cointegration techniques that account for linear and nonlinear effects in fiscal policy actions. Unlike previous studies, the evidence suggests that, allowing for structural breaks, the Greek budget deficit is unsustainable. The parameter after the second detected break reflects the structural deficiencies of the Greek economy.