Juncal Cunado

Do oil price shocks matter? Evidence for some European countries

This paper analyzes the oil price-macroeconomy relationship by means of analyzing the impact of oil prices on inflation and industrial production indexes for many European countries using quarterly data for the period 1960-1999. First, we test for cointegration allowing for structural breaks among the variables. Second, and in order to account for the possible non-linear relationships, we use different transformation of oil price data. The main results suggest that oil prices have permanent effects on inflation and short run but asymmetric effects on production growth rates. Furthermore, significant differences are found among the responses of the countries to these shocks.

Seasonal Fractional Integration in the Spanish Tourism Quarterly Time Series

Seasonal fractional models are shown in this article to be alternative credible ways of modeling the seasonal component in the Spanish tourism time series. The authors use a testing procedure, due to Robinson, that permits them to consider unit and fractional orders of integration in raw time series. This method is applied to the number of foreigners and the number of foreign guest nights in Spain, the results showing that the orders of integration in both series are higher than 0 but smaller than 1, implying seasonal long memory behavior.

Fractional integration and structural breaks: evidence from international monthly arrivals in the USA

This paper proposes a new modelling approach for the total number of international monthly arrivals in the USA using fractional integration with a structural break that is endogenously determined by the model. As expected, the results show that the break date occurs at September 2001. Disaggregating the data according to the location of origin for the arrivals, the break at September 2001 is also found in most cases, the only exceptions being Canada (February 1998) and the Middle East (September 2000). More importantly, the fact that the orders of integration of all series are strictly smaller than one implies that the series are mean reverting. Thus, the negative shock produced by the 9/11 terrorist attacks should be transitory and no strong policies should be implemented to recover the number of arrivals in the USA.

The nature of seasonality in Spanish tourism time series.

This paper deals with the analysis of seasonality in the context of tourism time series. The authors present a general testing procedure that permits them to consider the cases of deterministic and/or stochastic (with integer and fractional differentiation) seasonality in a unified treatment. The procedure is applied to four Spanish tourism time series: the total (foreign and domestic) number of tourists, the number of domestic tourists, the number of nights spent in hotel accommodation by tourists, and the number of nights spent in hotel accommodation by domestic tourists. The results show that the series can be well described in terms of seasonally fractionally integrated models, with the orders of integration ranging between 0.4 and 0.6 in the case of white noise disturbances, and values slightly smaller with autocorrelated disturbances. Thus the standard practice of taking seasonal dummies (deterministic seasonality) or integer differentiation (seasonal unit roots) may lead to erroneous conclusions about the stochastic behaviour of the series. Moreover, the series seem to be mean reverting, implying that shocks affecting them disappear in the long run though at a very slow hyperbolic rate.

Modelling Long-Run Trends and Cycles in Financial Time Series Data

This paper proposes a very general time series framework to capture the long-run behaviour of financial series. The suggested model includes linear and non-linear time trends, and stationary and nonstationary processes based on integer and/or fractional degrees of differentiation. Moreover, the spectrum is allowed to contain more than a single pole or singularity, occurring at zero and non-zero (cyclical) frequencies. This model is used to analyse four annual time series with a long span, namely dividends, earnings, interest rates and long-term government bond yields. The results indicate that the four series exhibit fractional integration with one or two poles in the spectrum. A forecasting comparison shows that a model with a non-linear trend along with fractional integration outperforms alternative models over long horizons.

Real convergence in some Central and Eastern European countries

This article examines the real convergence hypothesis in some Central and East European countries (both towards the German and the US economies) by means of using time series techniques during the period 1950 to 2003. No evidence is found of real convergence for the whole period. However, when one allows for structural breaks, evidence is found of a catch-up process during the 1990s to 2003 period for Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary towards Germany and only for Poland towards the US economy.

Testing for stock market bubbles using nonlinear models and fractional integration

In this article we test for bubbles in the S&P 500 stock market index using monthly data over the period 1871m1–2004m6. We use fractional integration techniques, allowing for structural breaks and a nonlinear adjustment process of prices to dividends. We find a significant structural break around 1932, a period in which the stock market began rising again after the market crash of 1929. Furthermore, we do not find evidence of asymmetric adjustment of prices to dividends when using both momentum-threshold autoregressive and threshold autoregressive models. Finally, we cannot reject the hypothesis of orders of integration equal to or higher than one and thus, we find support for the existence of bubbles in the S&P 500 stock market index.

The Macroeconomic Impacts of Natural Disasters: The Case of Floods

We use panel vector autoregression models to trace the dynamic response of output growth to flood shocks, using new data on large flood events in 135 countries between 1985 and 2008. Flood shocks tend to have a positive and significant average impact on per capita GDP growth. However, this effect is limited to developing countries and to moderate floods. The positive impact of floods is larger and more significant in the agricultural sector; while floods seem to have a direct effect on agricultural growth rates in developing countries, their effect on nonagricultural growth rates is mainly indirect. (JEL: O11, Q54)

Modelling Monthly Spanish Tourism: A Seasonal Fractionally Integrated Approach

The authors examine the monthly structure of Spanish tourism using fractionally integrated techniques. They propose the use of a procedure attributable to Robinson (1994) that permits the simultaneous testing of degrees of integration at both zero and seasonal frequencies. The tests have standard null and local limit distributions. However, finite-sample critical values are computed and the power properties of the tests in finite samples are also examined. The results, based on the numbers of foreigners and foreign guest nights in Spain, show that both frequencies are important, the order of integration at the long-run or zero frequency being much higher than that corresponding to the seasonal monthly structure.

Empirical evidence on real convergence in some OECD countries

The real convergence hypothesis in Australia, Canada, Japan and the UK is examined. For this purpose, the order of integration of the real GDP per capita series in these countries is examined as well as their differences with respect to the US which is used as a benchmark country. Both parametric and semiparametric methods are used and the results show that convergence is achieved in all countries, especially for the cases of Australia and Canada.