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Once upon a time, there were roaming charges and disgruntled consumers. As a result of a preliminary ruling1 concerning the validity of a legislative measure2 on roaming on public mobile telephone networks within the European Union (hereinafter 'Union'), the regulation of roaming charges may have been changed forever. The reference had been made in proceedings between operators of public mobile telephone networks, including Vodafone Ltd, Telefónica O2 Europe plc, T-Mobile International AG, and Orange Personal Communications Services Ltd, and the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The roaming regulation aimed to cap the wholesale and retail charges mobile operators could charge for the provision of roaming services on public mobile networks for voice calls between Member States. The validity of the roaming regulation was challenged on three grounds, namely that its legal basis was inadequate, that it infringed the principle of proportionality, and that it offended the principle of subsidiarity. It was left to the Court of Justice to seal the fate of the roaming consumers.

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The parameters of popular multivariate GARCH (MGARCH) models are restricted so that their estimation is feasible in large systems and covariance stationarity and positive definiteness of conditional covariance matrices are guaranteed. These restrictions limit the dynamics that the models can represent, assuming, for example, that volatilities evolve in an univariate fashion, not being related neither among them nor with the correlations. This paper updates previous surveyson parametric MGARCH models focusing on their limitations to represent the dynamics observed in real systems of financial returns. The conclusions are illustrated using simulated data and a five-dimensional system of exchange rate returns. ; The first author was supported by grants of 0969/13-3 CAPES, Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel. The second author acknowledges financial support from CAPES, grant 10600/13-2, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), grant 2013/00506-1, and Laboratory EPIFISMA. Financial support from ECO2012-32401 project by the Spanish Government is gratefully acknowledged by the third author.

This paper empirically verifies that the types of capital adjustment costs serve as an important mechanism in relation to investment decision- making after confirming that the investment dispersion of Korean firms is pro-cyclical and can affect busin ess cycles. Specifically, it is found through empirical methods using corporate financial data that capital adjustment costs generally assumed to take a quadratic form in macroeconomics are asymmetric and irreversible in the Korean economy. In particular, capital adjustment costs are empirically proven to cause investment dispersion to expand given that the substitution effect of the marginal value to the marginal cost for one unit of investment in the inter-temporal investment decision is affected by that cost with regard to the resale of owned equipment assets, as opposed to new investments in equipment assets. We ultimately show, albeit indirectly, that investment dispersi on can affect business cycles as capital adjustment cost s influences investment decisions. What is implied is that the capital adjustment cost is not merely an exogenously deep parameter that fits the dynamics of business cycles in a macroeconomic model but could instead be a policy variable that can be endogenized through government policies.

In der Politik und in den Medien wird darüber diskutiert, ob spekulativer Handel mit Agrarrohstoffen den Hunger in der Welt vermehrt. In diesem Aufsatz wird untersucht, in welchem Umfang sich Schwankungen von Agrarrohstoffpreisen auf nationale Verbraucherpreise für Lebensmittel in Indien als einem großen Land mit einem großen Anteil an armen Menschen übertragen. Es wird gezeigt, dass Agrarrohstoffpreisschwankungen mit einem Quartal Verzögerung signifikante Effekte auf die Verbraucherpreisinflation für Lebensmittel und die Verbraucherpreisinflation insgesamt in Indien haben. Quantitativ bedeutend waren diese Effekte etwa 2007/2008 und 2010/2011. Aufgrund der restriktiven Reaktion der indischen Zentralbank auf einen Anstieg der Verbraucherpreisinflation kommt es zusätzlich zu negativen Auswirkungen auf die Konjunktur. Allerdings sind andere Faktoren für die Schwankungen der Lebensmittelpreise in Indien wesentlich bedeutender.

From a retrospective perspective, effective future fiscal cooperation in Europe is not likely to stand a chance. Focusing on the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP, the Pact), this paper studies the determinants of national policymakers' changing commitment to a multilateral fiscal rule, referred to as the 'dynamic commitment problem'. The empirical analysis sheds light on the economic and political economy factors that contribute to national policymakers' aversion to a multilateral fiscal rule in a monetary union that is not a political union. The underlying analysis is based on an event study including 147 statements of EU heads of government (the European Council) and members of the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (the EcoFin) over the period 2001 to 2008. All statements are either related to flexible interpretations of the SGP or calls for changing the rules of the framework, thus being an indicator of political non-commitment to the Pact. Standard political-economy theory is considered to derive a number of testable hypotheses. The unique dataset is linked to econometric analysis in order to estimate the effects of national economic and national political economy determinants on the strength of political aversion to the SGP. The empirical findings show that political aversion to the SGP is positively correlated to the national budgetary deficit, negatively correlated to domestic economic growth and negatively correlated to the costs of government borrowing. In addition, the results indicate that economic and political power, government fragmentation and rising non- commitment amongst other member countries' politicians systematically influence national political aversion to the SGP. The findings cast serious doubts on future EU/EMU policymakers' full commitment to the recently revised SGP and the recently adopted European Fiscal Compact, both of which are discussed in the final part of the paper.