Testing the Granger Noncausality Hypothesis in Stationary Nonlinear Models of Unknown Functional Form

Spillover and Drivers of Uncertainty among Oil and Commodity Markets

The paper aims to examine the spillover of uncertainty among commodity markets using Diebold–Yilmaz approach based on forecast error variance decomposition. Next, causal impact of global factors as drivers of uncertainty transmission between oil and other commodity markets is analyzed. Our analysis suggests that oil is a net transmitter to other commodity uncertainties, and this transmission significantly increased during the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. The use of linear and nonlinear causality tests indicates that the global factors have a causal effect on the overall connectedness, and especially on the spillovers from oil to other commodity uncertainties. Further segregation of transmissions between oil to individual commodity markets indicates that stock market implied volatility, risk spread, and economic policy uncertainty are the influential drivers of connectedness among commodity markets.

Time-Varying Risk Aversion and the Profitability of Carry Trades: Evidence from the Cross-Quantilogram

This paper examines the predictive power of time-varying risk aversion over payoffs to the carry trade strategy via the cross-quantilogram methodology. Our analysis yields significant evidence of directional predictability from risk aversion to daily carry trade returns tracked by the Deutsche Bank G10 Currency Future Harvest Total Return Index. The predictive power of risk aversion is found to be stronger during periods of moderate to high risk aversion and largely concentrated on extreme fluctuations in carry trade returns. While large crashes in carry trade returns are associated with significant rises in investors’ risk aversion, we also found that booms in carry trade returns can be predicted at high quantiles of risk aversion. The results highlight the predictive role of extreme investor sentiment in currency markets and regime specific patterns in carry trade returns that can be captured via quantile-based predictive models.

Re-assessing causality between energy consumption and economic growth

The energy consumption-growth nexus has been widely studied in the empirical literature, though results have been inconclusive regarding the direction, or even the existence, of causality. These inconsistent results can be explained by two important limitations of the literature. First, the use of bivariate models, which fail to detect more complex causal relations, or the ad hoc approach to selecting variables in a multivariate framework; and, second, the use of linear causal models, which are unable to capture more complex nonlinear causal relationships. In this paper, we aim to overcome both limitations by analysing the energy consumption-growth nexus using a Flexible Fourier form due to Enders and Jones (2016). The analysis focuses on the US over the period 1949 to 2014. From our results we can conclude that, where the linear methodology supports the neutrality hypothesis (no causality between energy consumption and growth), the Flexible Fourier form points to the existence of causality from energy consumption to growth. This is contrary to the linear analysis, suggesting that lowering energy consumption would adversely affect US economic growth. Thus, by employing the Flexible Fourier form we find the conclusions can be quite different.