C19 - Econometric and Statistical Methods: OtherReturn

This article deals with an analysis of the relationship between the Brent oil price and the US dollar price. This paper analyses the development of the intensity and direction of dependence between the nominal effective exchange rate of the US dollar and the price of Brent oil and other commodities, such as industrial metals, agricultural commodities, gold (including jewellery and platinum) in the period from January 1994 to April 2018. The next section tests the hypothesis that there is a short-term relationship between the effective US dollar exchange rate and the oil price. The last part of the article deals with the question whether there is a long-term relationship between these variables: Brent oil price, effective exchange rate of the US dollar, industrial production index in OECD countries, three-month treasury bill, US ending stocks of crude oil, US percent utilization of refinery operable capacity and the price of ethanol.

The problem that assets of a fund are not sufficient to cover its liabilities is of extreme importance both for its members as well as for fund managers. We show that this problem can be solved via total claims distributions and give answers to the following questions: How much money will be needed in the first pillar in order to satisfy the requirements of pensioners in a time horizon and which groups of working people should join also the second pillar because their benefits from it will be greater than those from the first pillar? Though the paper concentrates primarily on the situation with Slovakian pension funds we believe that our findings are more general. We show that the alternative methods should be used for calculation of extremes. We discuss the so-called barrier strategy for treating the surplus of an insurance company and bring some new results concerning it.

The aim of the article is to propose a new measure of a relative economic distance between two countries (RED) or among a group of countries (GRED). Both measures enable to evaluate 'proximity' between national economies through time series of selected variables, and are related to the concept of the sigma (beta) convergence introduced by Barro and Sala-i Martin (1995). In the empirical part of the paper, the RED of Poland, Slovakia, Austria, Germany, the USA and Japan with regard to the Czech Republic are estimated, as well as the time evolution of the GRED of the Czech Republic and its neighbours. The main finding is the strong convergence among these countries after the outbreak of the financial crisis which persists to this day.