A New Materials and Design Approach for Roads, Bridges, Pavement, and Concrete

Increased understanding of demand for transport energy and how to improve road pavement materials would enable decision makers to make environmental, financial, and other positive changes in future planning and design of roads, bridges, and other important transportation structures. This research comprises three studies focused on pavement materials and a fourth study that examines energy demand within the road transportation sector. These studies are as follows: 1. A techno-economic study of ground tire rubber as an asphalt modifier; 2. A computational fluid dynamics analysis comparing the urban heat island effect of two different pavement materials – asphalt and Portland Cement Concrete; 3. A new approach that modifies the surface of ground tire rubber using low-cost chemicals and treatment methods to be used in asphalt applications; and 4. Analysis of road transport energy demand in California and the United States. The findings of these studies include that 1. GTR is an effective and economically suitable additive for modified asphalt, 2. the suitability of PCC pavements in urban settings should be reexamined, 3. Surface modification of GTR materials can improve compatibilization of particles for the manufacture of asphalt materials, and 4. gasoline sales are generally price inelastic in both the U.S. and California. Ultimately, these four studies improve understanding of road pavement materials and transport energy demand. They lay out important information about the future of the relationship between materials and design in the transportation industry. These findings may be used by engineers, policymakers, and others in the industry to better consider implications of decisions involved in design, creation, and modification of structures using pavement and concrete, including roads, bridges, etc

Are disaggregate industrial returns sensitive to economic policy uncertainty

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. This study investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty on disaggregate US sector based returns. Our work is motivated by the presence of non-linear relationship between US economic policy uncertainty and equity returns of sampled US sectors. The paper uses weekly data from January 1995 to December 2015 for all the return indices and economic policy uncertainty data mainly based on policy issues, provision set for the US federal tax code and disagreement among economic forecasters. Our results indicate that information technology, utilities, industrial and telecommunication sectors remain insensitive to changes in the US economic policy uncertainty. However, financial and the consumer discretionary sectors show significant long run asymmetric relationship with the EPU.Accepted versio

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Asymmetry in Exchange Rate Pass-Through into Import Prices

We analyse exchange rate pass-through into import prices for a large group of 33 emerging and developed economies from 1980Q1 to 2010Q4. Our error correction models permit asymmetric pass-through for currency appreciations and depreciations over three horizons of interest: on impact, in the short run and in the long run. We find that depreciations are typically passed-through more strongly than appreciations in the long-run, suggesting that exporters may exert a degree of long-run pricing power. This asymmetry is stronger in economies which are more import dependent but is moderated by freedom to trade and a positive output gap. Given that this pass-through asymmetry is welfare-reducing for consumers in the destination market, a key macroeconomic implication is that import-dependent economies, in particular, can benefit from trade liberalisation

Oil and food prices co-integration nexus for Indonesia: a non-linear autoregressive distributed lag analysis

This paper examines the relationship between the prices of oil and food price for Indonesia using non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) method. The bound test for co-integration for the NARDL model shows the evidence of co-integration between food price, growth rate of gross domestic product and oil price. The estimated NARDL for the oil price in domestic currency provides strong evidence of long- and short-run co-integration between food and oil price when the latter increases while the relations for oil price reduction is not present and insignificant. The estimators of positive change in oil price model measured in US Dollar are significant in our study

Is there a difference? Exchange rate nonlinearities in European agri-food (versus total) exports to the US

Each time the Euro starts appreciating, a discussion on how painful this might hit European exporters arises in media, making politician and economists work out the ways to mitigate possible shocks. Still, in his recent study, Verheyen (2013a) using aggregated European exports to the US as an example, showed, that in the long run exports react on exchange rate changes in a nonlinear way. Particularly his analysis revealed, that a positive impact on trade during the Euro depreciation seem to outweigh the losses caused by its appreciations. In this paper, I test whether this holds true for agri-food exports as well. To address this question, I apply a partial sum decomposition approach and the NARDL framework of Shin et al. (2013) to aggregated agri-food exports as well as to total exports of eleven European countries to the US, which is currently the major partner of the EU in agri-food trade. The outcomes suggest, that the exchange rate nonlinearities are even more pronounced in agri-food than in total exports. Despite the ongoing discussion regarding the nocent effect of a strong national currency on exports, the estimation results suggest that European agri-food exporters have found their way to cope with such negative effects. European exporters seem to benefit more from Euro depreciation, than its appreciation harm them. I interpret this finding as a sign of pricing strategies application (e.g., pricing-to-market) to the European agri-food exports

Asymmetric and nonlinear pass-through of energy prices to CO2 emission allowance prices

We use the recently developed nonlinear autoregressive distributed lags (NARDL) model to examine the pass-through of changes in crude oil prices, natural gas prices, coal prices and electricity prices to the CO2 emission allowance prices. This approach allows one to simultaneously test the short- and long-run nonlinearities through the positive and negative partial sum decompositions of the predetermined explanatory variables. It also offers the possibility to quantify the respective responses of the CO2 emission prices to positive and negative shocks to the prices of their determinants from the asymmetric dynamic multipliers. We find that: (i) the crude oil prices have a long-run negative and asymmetric effect on the CO2 allowance prices; (ii) the falls in the coal prices have a stronger impact on the carbon prices in the short-run than the increases; (iii) the natural gas prices and electricity prices have a symmetric effect on the carbon prices, but this effect is negative for the former and positive for the latter. Policy implications are provided.COMPETE, QREN, FEDER, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

The Great Moderation and the Decoupling of Monetary Policy from Long-Term Rates in the U.S. and Germany

We apply the asymmetric ARDL model advanced by Shin, Yu and Greenwood-Nimmo (2009) to the analysis of the patterns of pass-through from policy-controlled interest rates to a variety of longer-term rates in the U.S. and Germany. Our results reveal three main phenomena. Firstly, while the e®ect of a rate hike is largely con¯ned to the short-run, the e®ect of a rate cut is muted in the short-run but non-negligible at longer horizons. We characterise this pattern as a switch from short-run positive asymmetry to long-run negative asymmetry, a pattern that potentially reconciles the con°icting empirical evidence and theoretical conjectures that dominate the existing literature. Secondly, our results con¯rm that there has been a decoupling of long-term rates from policy-controlled rates during the period of the Great Moderation in both the U.S. and Germany, albeit in a complex and nonlinear way. Thirdly, by replicating Taylor's (2007) counterfactual exercise using our asymmetric models, we ¯nd that Taylor over-estimates the importance of policy-controlled rates for the broader economy. Equivalently, our results do not support Greenspan's belief that the decoupling is a recent phenomenon. In light of our findings, we conclude that a narrow focus on the interest rate as the sole instrument of monetary policy is likely to be sub-optimal under current institutional arrangements.Asymmetric ARDL Model and Dynamic Multipliers, Great Moderation, Asymmetric Interest Rate Pass-through

‘Nonlinear causality between crude oil price and exchange rate: A comparative study of China and India’ - A failed replication (negative Type 1 and Type 2)

Evidence published in this journal by Bal and Rath (2015) purports a bidirectional nonlinear causality between oil price and India’s exchange rate and, for China, unidirectional nonlinear causality running from exchange rate to oil price. Their entire testing protocol and ensuing results rest upon claims that all the variables contain a unit root. We raise several critical issues and revisit the order of integration of the series as well as their cointegration and Granger causality properties through a ‘pure replication’ and a ‘reanalysis’. Contrary to Bal and Rath (2015), when we repeat their estimated model with their specification of the Ng and Perron (2001) unit root test on their data, we find that their oil price series (ROL) is level stationary (negative replication Type 1), a result which makes all their subsequent results biased and misleading. Our reanalysis confirms that ROL is I(0), linearly as well as nonlinearly. We also find that the basic bivariate model proposed by Bal and Rath (2015) fails to produce statistically robust and stable cointegrating patterns. Nonlinear causality tests confirm the absence of any nonlinear causality for both countries (negative replication Type 2).NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Energy Economics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Energy Economics, 56 (28 March 2016) DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2016.03.014© 2016, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/<br/