Claude Lopez

Reserve Bank of Australia · Financial Stability

In this report, we show that a standard set of variables would partially resolve inconsistencies and lack of uniform standards among rating providers, which often confuses investors. Furthermore, we dissociate the impact of the rating agencies’ different focus on E, S, or G from that of using non-standardized data. While the former, if properly dis...

The 2023 Global Opportunity Index (GOI) report focuses on Emerging Middle Income (EMIs) G20 countries. The GOI rankings of the 124 countries considered this year are published on our interactive website. Most EMIs G20 perform significantly better than countries with a similar level of development in two dimensions of the GOI: • Financial Services...

The 2022 update on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) highlights that: • The treatment prevalence and related costs have significantly increased in the past 10 years 👉 + 31% since 2012 to $2.43 million The latest estimates show that $47.5 billion are spent on comprehensive medical care and $12.8 billion on ADRD treatments • When it...

The Community Explorer provides novel insightintoon the different characteristics of the U.S. population that can be used in policy design and impact assessment. More broadly, it increases the understanding of socio-economic gaps and potential markets in the U.S.. More specifically, it synthesizes the information of 751 variables across 3142 count...

Literacy plays a central role in health and health care. A person’s level of health literacy influences their health-related behaviors along with their ability to navigate the complexities of the health-care system. The level of health literacy of individuals or communities often mirrors disparities in society. Low health literacy is frequently ass...

This report summarizes the recent key regulatory changes in the US, Europe, and China. It shows these jurisdictions have different regulatory approaches while being confronted with similar challenges. They all seek the right regulatory balance between: • promoting market efficiency while minimizing antitrust issues, • strengthening financial inclus...

This report proposes a new approach to investigate US health disparities that focuses on understanding populations' specificities before looking at their health profile. It first identifies the US's different populations or communities based on their behavioral, demographic, economic, and social profiles. Then it links these profiles to chronic dis...

This report uses the 2021 Global Opportunity Index and its different categories to provide an overview of Latin America's attractiveness to foreign investors, especially when compared to other emerging markets and developing economies (EMDE). It also offers an in-depth look at Latin America's global capital inflows (emphasizing their composition an...

This report aims to identify disease categories with the highest economic and social costs and a low level of R&D investment. First, we combine data sets on diseases’ medical expenses, patient counts, death rates, and research funding. We then use text mining and machine learning methods to identify gaps between diseases’ social and economic costs...

Obesity impacts segments of the US population differently based on their behavioral and socioeconomic profiles. The Milken Institute COVID-19 Community Explorer sorts US counties around eight profiles of communities that share common patterns across behavioral, economic, and social factors. This report uses these communities and identifies which of...

The launch of the Bahrain FinTech Bay in 2018 was a significant step for Bahrain toward becoming a technology and innovation hub. It continues to develop its infrastructure to enable the developments using Fourth Industrial Revolutionrelevant technology while updating the corporate governance framework in an attempt to curtail investor uncertainty...

Saudi Arabia’s presidency of the 2020 G20 and the Expo 2020 in Dubai offer a unique opportunity to showcase the region’s ongoing efforts to attract international investments. This report uses the Global Opportunity Index and its different categories to assess the region’s improvements in 2019. More specifically, it compares the Gulf Cooperation Cou...

This note discusses W20’s contributions to the gender equality agenda and policies promoted by the G20 and the G20 member states. The first part analyses the progress made by G20 countries on gender equality as framed by W20 recommendations. The assessment focuses on improvements on the main pillars and relies on existing standardized indicators an...

This report uses the Global Opportunity Index (GOI) and its different categories to assess the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries' improvements in 2019. More specifically, it compares the GCC countries' performances to those of a reference group, the upper-middle-income countries. The analysis provides a better understanding of the countries'...

Basell III was a direct answer to the 2008 financial crisis. Now 10 years after the crisis, it is time to assess its timeliness and make the necessary adjustments so it becomes truly global. In this policy brief, we first clarify the goals of macroprudential policy before highlighting the main challenges that home and host countries may run into wh...

In a time of global crisis, international policy coordination is quite natural. Yet, in normal times such coordination becomes a challenge. This is an issue especially when it comes to monetary and macroprudential policy of globally influential countries. This is especially relevant now with the trend of monetary normalisation in many of these coun...

Investor appetite for emerging economies’ assets has weakened, but the underlying reasons for this change vary across countries. In this report, we use the Global Opportunity Index (GOI) to identify some of the idiosyncratic country characteristics that matter the most for emerging market economies to attract and retain investors in challenging tim...

Crypto-Assets (CA) are digital instruments aimed to serve as mediums of exchange that rely on decentralized control and boast the (yet to prove) promise of a revolution in Finance. Their meteoric rise entails both opportunities and perils. Rewards are uncertain; risks, much more tractable. We propose the design of a cross border framework to put CA...

In the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, new legislation and regulations have pressured banks and insurance companies to reduce their size, leverage, and riskier lines of business in order to avoid another too-big-to-fail debacle. Nonbank financial intermediaries have naturally taken up some of that slack, and, not surprisingly, regulato...

Based on the 2016 edition of the Milken Institute Global Opportunity Index, the report assesses the attractiveness of Asian countries to foreign investors and provides a closer look at the composition of Asia’s capital inflows. The region is strong when compared to the rest of the world, especially in terms of business perception, but would benefit...

Based on the 2016 edition of the Milken Institute Global Opportunity Index, the report assesses the attractiveness of Asian countries to foreign investors and provides a closer look at the composition of Asia’s capital inflows. The region is strong when compared to the rest of the world, especially in terms of business perception, but would benefit...

While large businesses have resumed international trade at levels seen before the financial crisis, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have not fared as well. For these firms — the backbone of economies everywhere — growth is impeded by the limited availability of bank loans to finance trade. The problem is especially acute for SMEs in Asia...

As many central banks contemplate the normalization of monetary policy, their focus is turning to the promise of macroprudential policy as a tool to manage possible future systemic risk in financial markets. Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi, among others, are pinning much of their hopes for managing financial stability in the context of Basel III on m...

The impact of exchange rate changes on growth - a long-standing key issue in international macroeconomics - has received renewed attention in recent years owing to weaker growth rates and the debate on ‘currency wars’. The connection between real exchange rates and growth remains, however, an unsettled question in the academic literature. We fill t...

In this paper, we propose to identify the dependence structure existing between the returns of equity and commodity futures and its evolution through the past 20 years. The key point is that we do not do not impose the dependence structure but let the data select it. To do so, we model the dependence between commodity (metal, agriculture and energy...

We study the behavior of inflation rates among the 12 initial Euro countries in order to test whether and when the group convergence initially dictated by the Maastricht treaty and now by the ECB, occurs. We also assess the impact of events such as the advent of the Euro and the 2008 financial crisis. Due to the small size of the estimation sample,...

In this paper, we propose to identify the dependence structure existing between the returns of equity and commodity futures and its evolution through the past 20 years. The key point is that we do not do not impose the dependence structure but let the data select it. To do so, we model the dependence between commodity (metal, agriculture and energy...

The external imbalances between major countries and within the euro area have brought back to the fore discussions about the rebalancing between surplus and deficit countries and about the focus placed on competitiveness and one of its instruments or indicators: the exchange rate. The European Commission decided to use the exchange rate as one of t...

Determining whether per capita output can be characterized by a stochastic trend is complicated by the fact that infrequent breaks in trend can bias standard unit root tests towards non-rejection of the unit root hypothesis. The bulk of the existing literature has focused on the application of unit root tests allowing for structural breaks in the t...

[eng] Transportation costs and monopoly location in presence of regional disparities. . This article aims at analysing the impact of the level of transportation costs on the location choice of a monopolist. We consider two asymmetric regions. The heterogeneity of space lies in both regional incomes and population sizes: the first region is endowed...

This article analyzes the hysteresis hypothesis in the unemployment rates of the four “French overseas regions†(Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Reunion) [FORs] over the period 1993-2008. We use standard univariate and panel unit root tests, among them Choi (2006) and Lopez (2009) that account for cross-sectional dependence and have improved per...

This paper proposes a version of the DF-GLS test that incorporates up to two breaks in the intercept, namely the DF-GLSTB test. While the asymptotic properties of the DF-GLS test remain valid, the presence of changes in the intercept has an impact on the small sample properties of the test. Hence, finite sample critical values for the DF-GLSTB test...

Many economic theories connecting the real interest rate and the per-capita consumption growth rate require that both rates evolve together over time. This article investigates whether these rates present similar stationary behaviour for the seven most industrialized countries over the 1957–2005 period. The analysis relies on the unit root tests de...

Determining whether per capita output can be characterized by a stochastic trend is complicated by the fact that infrequent breaks in trend can bias standard unit root tests towards non-rejection of the unit root hypothesis. The bulk of the existing literature has focused on the application of unit root tests allowing for structural breaks in the t...

This article analyzes the hysteresis hypothesis in the unemployment rates of the four “French overseas regions” (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Reunion) [FORs] over the period 1993-2008. We use standard univariate and panel unit root tests, among them Choi(2006) and Lopez (2009) that account for cross-sectional dependence and have improved perform...

While panel unit root tests have been used to investigate a wide range of macroeconomic issues, the tests suffer from low power to reject the unit root null in panels of stationary series if the panels consist of highly persistent series, contain a small number of series, and/or have series with a limited length. We propose a new procedure to incre...

[eng] Transportation costs and monopoly location in presence of regional disparities. . This article aims at analysing the impact of the level of transportation costs on the location choice of a monopolist. We consider two asymmetric regions. The heterogeneity of space lies in both regional incomes and population sizes: the first region is endowed...

This study investigates the stationary behavior of the inflation rates for the Euro- zone members and some neighboring countries, for the 1957:2 to 2007:3 period. The analysis uses univariate unit root tests with enhanced small-sample performances that allow up to two breaks in the intercept, namely those of Elliott et al. (1996) and Lopez (2008)....

Remittances are private monetary transfers yet the rapidly growing literature on the subject seems to forget their monetary nature and thus ignore the role that exchange rate regimes play in determining the effect remittances have on a recipient economy. This paper uses a theoretical model and panel vector autoregression techniques to explore the r...

Using median-unbiased estimation, recent research has questioned the validity of Rogoff’s “remarkable consensus” of 3-5 year half-lives of deviations from PPP. These half-life estimates, however, are based on estimates from regressions where the resulting unit root test has low power. We extend median-unbiased estimation to the DF-GLS regression of...

We investigate convergence towards purchasing power parity (PPP) within the eurozone and between the eurozone and its main partners using panel data methods. We find strong rejections of the unit-root hypothesis, and therefore evidence of PPP, in the eurozone for different numéraire currencies, as well as in the eurozone plus the United States with...

We investigate convergence towards purchasing power parity (PPP) within the eurozone and between the eurozone and its main partners using panel data methods. We find strong rejections of the unit-root hypothesis, and therefore evidence of PPP, in the eurozone for different numéraire currencies, as well as in the eurozone plus the United States with...

Using median-unbiased estimation, recent research has questioned the validity of Rogoff's "remarkable consensus" of 3-5 year half-lives of deviations from PPP. These estimates, however, are based on unit root tests with low power. We extend median-unbiased estimation to the efficient univariate unit root test of Elliott, Rothenberg, and Stock (1996...

Many economic theories connecting the real interest rate and the per-capita consumption growth rate require that both rates evolve together over time. This paper investigates whether these rates present similar stationary behavior for the seven most industrialized countries over the 1957-2005 period. The analysis relies on the unit root tests devel...

The present paper suggests a set of unit root tests allowing up to two changes in the intercept, within the local-to-unity framework. The truncation lag and the break date are selected endogenously. The finite sample critical values are tabulates and Monte carlo experiments are used to analyze the tests' behavior. Three main outcomes can be derived...

We propose a new pooled panel unit root test allowing for serial and contemporaneous correlation. The test combines Elliott et al. (199611. Elliott , G. , Rothenberg , T. , Stock , J. H. ( 1996 ). Efficient tests for an autoregressive unit root . Econometrica 64 : 813 – 836 . [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) local-to-unity tran...

Although the question of whether Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) holds in the long run has been extensively studied, the answer is still controversial. Some of the strongest evidence is provided by Taylor (2002), who concludes that long-run PPP held over the twentieth century. We argue that this conclusion is quite sensitive to the use of sub-optimal...

We propose to combine recent developments in univariate and mul- tivariate unit root testing in order to construct a more powerful panel unit root test. We extend the GLS-detrending procedure of Elliott, Rothenberg and Stock (1996) to a panel Augmented Dickey-Fuller test. The .nite sample power properties of the new test demonstrate a very large ga...

Using median-unbiased estimation, recent research has questioned the validity of Rogoff’s “remarkable consensus” of 3-5 year half-lives of deviations from PPP. These estimates, however, are based on unit root tests with low power. We extend median-unbiased estimation to the efficient unit root test of Elliott, Rothenberg, and Stock (1996). We find...

We combined recent developments in univariate and multivariate unit root testing in order to construct a more-powerful panel unit root test. We extended the GLS-detrending procedure of Elliott, Rothenberg, and Stock (1996) to a panel Augmented Dickey-Fuller test. The finite sample power properties of the new test demonstrate a very large gain when...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Houston, 2003. Degree granted by Dept. of Economics. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-72).

Using median-unbiased estimation, recent research has questioned the validity of Rogoff's "remarkable consensus" of 3-5 year half-lives of deviations from PPP. These half-life estimates, however, are based on estimates from regressions where the resulting unit root test has low power. We extend median-unbiased estimation to the DF-GLS regression of...

We study the behavior of inflation rates among Euro countries. More specifically, we are interested in testing whether and when group convergence dictated by the Maastricht treaty occurs, and we assess the impact of events such as the advent of the Euro and the 2008 financial crisis. Due to the small size of the estimation sample, we propose a new...