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This chapter enquires into the contribution of two British writers, Herbert Somerton Foxwell and Henry Riverdale Grenfell, who elaborated upon the hints provided by Jevons towards a description of long waves in the oscillations of prices. Writing two decades after Jevons, they witnessed the era of high prices turning into the great depression of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the causes of which they saw in the end of bimetallism. Not only did they take up Jevons’s specific explanation of the long fluctuations, but they also based their discussion upon graphical representation of data and incorporated in their treatment a specific trait (the superposition principle) of the ‘waves’ metaphor emphasized by the Manchester statisticians in the 1850s and 1860s. Their contribution is also interesting for their understanding of crises versus depressions at the time of the emergence of the interpretation of oscillations as a cycle, which they have only partially grasped – as distinct from the approach of later long wave theorists.

The purpose of this paper is to re‐examine the structural origins of international crude oil price fluctuation.

The paper establishes a structural vector autoregression model based on the generalized supply and demand analysis of crude oil price fluctuation and performance the structural decomposition of price shocks with impulse response analysis of those factors.

It is found that four kinds of structural shocks derived from the generalized supply and demand analysis are the essential determinants of crude oil prices fluctuation. On one hand, similar to Kilian's results, the supply side shocks – both the exogenous geopolitical ones and other oil supply shocks have little influence. Whereas, the demand side shocks – both the aggregate demand shock and the oil market specific demand shock have prominent effects. On the other hand, with the expanded sample range, it is found that the dynamic characteristic of the impulse response of oil price to demand side factors is not only incompatible with the basic economic theory, but also clashes with Kilian's statement based upon his research. It is conjured that the incompatibility comes from the ignorance of the finer decomposition of demand side factors. To decompose those demand side factors further, the US dollar liquidity was added into the model. The results show that the impact of US dollar liquidity on the fluctuation of oil prices cannot be ignored. The argument that ascribes the soaring international crude oil price to China's economic growth lacks theoretical and empirical evidence.

The paper contributes marginally to the research on the structural origins of international crude oil price fluctuation and sheds light on the possibility of finer decomposition of demand side oil shocks.

The issue of export instability exerts an enduring fascination for economists with an interest in the area of economic development. Over several decades a voluminous literature has emerged embracing debates on the domestic consequences and on the causes of export instability. The purpose here is to examine these debates and an attempt is made to set out different theoretical stances, to classify and examine empirical findings, and to indicate the directions in which the debates have moved. Such a statement of a review article's purpose is, of course, incomplete without more specific delineation of the boundaries within which the general objectives are pursued. Here that delineation has three facets.

When the power generator faces uncertain and independent electricity spot price and renewable energy source supply, two different conditions need to be considered: the distributions of renewable energy source electricity and electricity spot price are independent or dependent. The purpose of this paper is to explore the capacity investment strategy under volatile electricity spot price when renewable energy penetration rate is low, taking into account these two conditions.

The authors design a capacity investment model under dual uncertainties and consider how to optimize the investment capacity in order to maximize profit under two different conditions.

The authors find that when renewable energy supply fluctuation is unrelated to spot electricity price fluctuation, the renewable energy power profitability is determined by the average cost of spot electricity price and equivalent cost. When renewable energy supply fluctuation is related to spot electricity price fluctuation, the renewable energy power profitability is determined by the market value and the construction and maintenance cost.

Faced with the conflict of the renewable energy supply, the authors need to understand how to plan the generation capacity with intermittent renewable sources. The result helps renewable energy become competitive in the electricity market under loose regulations.

The authors compare two capacity investment strategies that the renewable energy supply fluctuation is related and unrelated to spot electricity price.

The authors explore the hypothesis that some movements in commodity prices are anticipated (news shocks) and can trigger aggregate fluctuations in small open emerging economies. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

The authors build a multi-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with endogenous commodity production. There are five exogenous processes: a country-specific interest rate shock that responds to commodity price fluctuations, a productivity (TFP) shock for each sector and a commodity price shock. Both TFP and commodity price shocks are composed of unanticipated and anticipated components.

The authors show that news shocks to commodity prices lead to higher output, investment and consumption, and a countercyclical movement in the trade-balance-to-output ratio. The authors also show that commodity price news shocks explain about 24% of output aggregate fluctuations in the small open economy.

Given the importance of both anticipated and unanticipated commodity price shocks, policymakers should pay attention to developments in commodity markets when designing policies to attenuate the business cycles. Future research should investigate the design of optimal fiscal and monetary policies in SOE subject to news shocks in commodity prices.

This paper contributes to the knowledge of the sources of fluctuations in emerging economies highlighting the importance of a new source: news shocks in commodity prices.

The paper aims to examine the effects of exchange rate fluctuations on real output, the price level, and the real value of components of aggregate demand in Egypt and Turkey.

Building on a theoretical model that decomposes movements in the exchange rate into anticipated and unanticipated components, the empirical investigation traces the effects through demand and supply channels.

In Turkey, anticipated exchange rate appreciation has significant adverse effects, contracting the growth of real output and the demand for investment and exports, while raising price inflation. Random fluctuations in Turkey have asymmetric effects that highlight the importance of unanticipated depreciation in shrinking output growth and the growth of private consumption and investment, despite an increase in export growth. In Egypt, anticipated exchange rate appreciation decreases export growth. Given asymmetry, the net effect of unanticipated exchange rate fluctuations, in Egypt, decreases real output and consumption growth and increases export growth, on average, over time.

In light of the country‐specific evidence, future research should extend the investigation using panel estimation, incorporating various demand and supply shocks along with exchange rate fluctuations, to establish the relative importance of various shocks on macroeconomic performance across MENA countries.

While adhering to a flexible exchange rate policy to boost competitiveness, managing fundamentals to reduce excessive volatility impinging on the economic system over time should top the policy agenda.

Excessive volatility in the real effective exchange rate could be detrimental to real growth, over time, as the evidence for Turkey and Egypt illustrates.

Business cycle theory is normally described as having evolved out of a previous tradition of writers focusing exclusively on crises. In this account, the turning point is seen as residing in Clément Juglar's contribution on commercial crises and their periodicity. It is well known that the champion of this view is Schumpeter, who propagated it on several occasions. The same author, however, pointed to a number of other writers who, before and at the same time as Juglar, stressed one or another of the aspects for which Juglar is credited primacy, including the recognition of periodicity and the identification of endogenous elements enabling the recognition of crises as a self-generating phenomenon. There is indeed a vast literature, both primary and secondary, relating to the debates on crises and fluctuations around the middle of the nineteenth century, from which it is apparent that Juglar's book Des Crises Commerciales et de leur Retour Périodique en France, en Angleterre et aux États-Unis (originally published in 1862 and very much revised and enlarged in 1889) did not come out of the blue but was one of the products of an intellectual climate inducing the thinking of crises not as unrelated events but as part of a more complex phenomenon consisting of recurring crises related to the development of the commercial world – an interpretation corroborated by the almost regular occurrence of crises at about 10-year intervals.

Allyn Young′s lectures, as recorded by the young Nicholas Kaldor, survey the historical roots of the subject from Aristotle through to the modern neo‐classical writers. The focus throughout is on the conditions making for economic progress, with stress on the institutional developments that extend and are extended by the size of the market. Organisational changes that promote the division of labour and specialisation within and between firms and industries, and which promote competition and mobility, are seen as the vital factors in growth. In the absence of new markets, inventions as such play only a minor role. The economic system is an inter‐related whole, or a living “organon”. It is from this perspective that micro‐economic relations are analysed, and this helps expose certain fallacies of composition associated with the marginal productivity theory of production and distribution. Factors are paid not because they are productive but because they are scarce. Likewise he shows why Marshallian supply and demand schedules, based on the “one thing at a time” approach, cannot adequately describe the dynamic growth properties of the system. Supply and demand cannot be simply integrated to arrive at a picture of the whole economy. These notes are complemented by eleven articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which were published shortly after Young′s sudden death in 1929.

The purpose of this paper is to research and analyze the influence of institutional investors in the present securities market due to behavior alienation with “running after rising and falling” and “herd behavior”.

A DeLong, Shleifer, Summers, and Waldmann (DSSW) model with positive feedback trading is established first to show the trading process, and these securities prices are calculated considering the investors' emotion. Through numerical analysis, the influence of institutional investors on securities price fluctuation is simulated. Further, the analysis of institutional investors' incomes is processed based on this model.

Through these analyses, the following conclusions are drawn: it lies on the scale of positive feedback traders and their sensitivity to past market performances whether the institutional investors can stabilize the market, and it is not necessary for the institutional investors to benefit from manipulating the market due to the existence of noise trader risk, so the positive feedback traders may survive in the security market over the long term.

The DSSW model considering positive feedback trading, presented in the paper, is more effective in analyzing the relation among the behavior of institutional investors, securities pricing and securities price fluctuation. The paper proposes some advice for policy decisions, which is helpful for government and institutions to maintain the stability of securities markets.