A multivariate analysis of tourists’ spending behaviour

According to the micro-economic theories regarding consumption behaviour, the determinants affecting the joint propensity of purchasing different goods and services are investigated. For this purpose, a copula-based model is suggested. This is in fact a suitable model to understand whether and how different expenditure categories are dependent with each other. A real application drawn from the tourism field is used to illustrate how the proposed approach works and to demonstrate its flexibility. The findings could guide local practitioners and managers in creating new promotional campaigns able to attract visitors willing to pay on a bundle of goods and services correlated with each other

How does monetary policy affect investment in the euro area?

We set out to analyze the monetary policy transmission mechanism by documenting how the annual investment of more than one million firms in Germany, Spain, France and Italy responded to monetary policy shocks between 2000 and 2016. We show that euro area firms react differently depending on their age and the industry they operate in: young firms and those producing durable goods react more strongly than the average firm. This confirms that monetary policy is affecting firms’ investment through two different channels. On the one hand, the interest rate channel affects demand for durable goods more than demand for services, which in turn affects investment demand from the producers of those goods. On the other hand, as young firms are more likely to face financing constraints, their stronger than average reaction can be explained by the balance sheet channel of monetary policy transmission

Distorted Copulas: Constructions and Tail Dependence

Given a copula C, we examine under which conditions on an order isomorphism ψ of [0, 1] the distortion C ψ: [0, 1]2 → [0, 1], C ψ(x, y) = ψ{C[ψ−1(x), ψ−1(y)]} is again a copula. In particular, when the copula C is totally positive of order 2, we give a sufficient condition on ψ that ensures that any distortion of C by means of ψ is again a copula. The presented results allow us to introduce in a more flexible way families of copulas exhibiting different behavior in the tails