The association between oil prices and inflation has remained an intriguing issue for media, academic as well as policy enquiry. Against this backdrop, we perform the frequency-domain causality test to investigate whether the growth rate of oil prices has predictive content for inflation in...

This paper investigates the existence of significant spillovers from the housing sector onto the wider economy for the seven major OECD countries using Uhlig's (2005) agnostic identification procedure. This method allows identifying a housing demand shock in a six-variable VAR model by imposing...

The conduct of inflation targeting is heavily dependent on accurate inflation forecasts. Non-linear models have increasingly featured, along with linear counterparts, in the forecasting literature. In this study, we focus on forecasting South African infl ation by means of non-linear models and...

This paper examines asymmetries in the impact of monetary policy on the middle segment of the South African housing market from 1966:M2 to 2011:M12. We use Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MS-VAR) models in which parameters change according to the phase of the housing cycle. The results...

The oil price-inflation relationship has been at the center of attention among economists and policy makers, especially after 1970’s oil shocks that resulted to a significant increase in the inflation rate in number of countries around the world. In this study, we aim to investigate the...

This paper employs classical bivariate, factor augmented (FA), slab and spike variable selection (SSVS)-based, and Bayesian semiparametric shrinkage (BSS)-based predictive regression models to forecast the US real private residential fixed investment series over an out of sample period of 1983Q1...

This paper investigates the causal relationship between asset prices and per capita output across 50 US states and the District of Columbia over 1975 to 2012. A bootstrap panel Granger causality approach is applied on a trivariate VAR comprising of real house prices, real stock prices and real...

In this paper we test the forecasting ability of three estimated financial conditions indices (FCIs) with respect to key macroeconomic variables of output growth, inflation and interest rates. We do this by forecasting the aforementioned macroeconomic variables based on the information contained...

This paper uses small set of variables-- real GDP, the inflation rate, and the short-term interest rate -- and a rich set of models -- athoeretical and theoretical, linear and nonlinear, as well as classical and Bayesian models -- to consider whether we could have predicted the recent downturn...

The paper examines the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for South Africa for the period 1971-2009. Most studies examining this relationship do assume that it remains constant through the years; however the reality might be different since many factors can affect the...