Investigating the Effect of Oil Revenue Shocks on Business Cycles and the Synchronism of Cycles with Selected OECD Countries

The effect of temporary and permanent shocks of oil revenues on the concurrence of trade cycles between Iran and selected OECD countries has been investigated using the data series of the period 1985–2019. For this purpose, first, business cycles and temporary and permanent shocks of oil revenues are extracted using Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter and Blanchard-Quah technique, respectively. Then, the relationship between business cycles and model-independent variables is evaluated by the ARDL method. The results show that the main cause of business cycle fluctuations is temporary shocks to oil revenues, also, government expenditure variables and permanent and temporary shocks to oil revenues in the short and long term have a negative and significant effect on business cycles, and the exchange rate variable has a positive and significant effect on business cycles. Estimation of business cycle synchronization index shows that Belgium, Germany, Greece, Japan, Spain, and Turkey have had business cycles synchronization with Iran. And Germany with a correlation coefficient of 0.42 has the most synchronization of business cycles with Iran.

Relationships Under Stress: Relational Outsourcing in the U.S. Airline Industry After the 2008 Financial Crisis

This paper studies how firms restructure their relational contracts in the face of permanent shocks to the value of their relationships. In the context of the U.S. airline industry, we argue that major carriers enter self-enforcing agreements with their outsourced regional partners because a key aspect of airline operations—the exchange of landing slots under adverse weather—is formally noncontractible. We show empirically that major and regional airlines did not terminate their relational contracts after the 2008 crisis but rather, restructured the scope of such contracts in a way that restored their credibility. In particular, we show that a major airline was less likely to continue outsourcing a route to a regional partner after the 2008 crisis the lower the present discounted value of their preexisting relationship and hence, the larger the negative effect of the crisis on the relational contract’s “self-enforcing range.” This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.

Measuring Long Run Risks for Brazil

We study the temporal structure of risk prices, risk exposures and expected market returns for Brazil assuming the economy follows a long run risks model. The model consists on an endowment economy where aggregate consumption and dividend growth contain predictable components, and a representative agent has Epstein-Zin recursive preferences with CES specification. We show that aggregate consumption in Brazil is sufficiently predictable to generate risk premia associated with Epstein-Zin preferences in excess of traditional compensations induced by power utility. Moreover, risk compensation is dominated by permanent shocks both in the short and long run, as Epstein-Zin preferences mitigate the price of temporary shocks' risk.