In this paper, we estimate the long-run equilibrium relationship between money balance as a ratio of income and the Treasury bill rate for the period of 1965:02 to 2007:01, and, in turn, use the relationship to obtain welfare cost estimates of inflation. Using the Johansen (1991, 1995)...

This paper establishes the prevailing financial factors that influence credit spread variability, and its impact on the U.S. business cycle over the Great Moderation and Great Recession periods. To do so, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium framework with a central role of financial...

This paper attempts to answer question similar to that asked by Ireland (2003): What explains the correlations between nominal and real variables in postwar US data? More precisely, this paper aims to investigate whether endogenous money, sticky wages, or some combination of the two, are...

This paper develops a new index of economic uncertainty for South Africa for the period 1990-2014 and analyses the macroeconomic impact of changes in this measure. The index is constructed from three sources: (1) Disagreement among professional forecasters about macroeconomic conditions using...

This paper studies the impacts of bank capital regulation on business cycle fluctuations. To do so, we adopt the Bernanke et al. (1999) "financial accelerator" model (BGG), to which we augment a banking sector to study the procyclical nature of Basel II claimed in the literature. We first study...

This study examines the impact of ChinaÂ’s dominant position among the BRIS countries, namely Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa. Particularly, by using a dynamic factor model estimated over the period 1995Q2-2009Q4, it investigates how supply and demand shocks from China are transmitted...

This paper studies the role of the equity price channel in business cycle fluctuations, and highlights its systemic risk across all sectors of the economy. We develop a canonical New-Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with a tractable role for the equity market in banking,...

This paper proposes a new online learning algorithms for portfolio selection based on alternative measure of price relative called the Cyclically Adjusted Price Relative (CAPR). The CAPR is derived from a simple state-space model of stock prices and we prove that the CAPR, unlike the standard...

This paper is the first one to analyse the effect of aggregate government spending and taxes on output for South Africa using three types of a calibrated DSGE model and more data driven models such as a structural vector error correction model (SVECM) and a time-varying parameter VAR (TVP-VAR)...

In 2002/03 the yield spread falsely signalled a downswing that never materialised. This paper provides two reasons for this false signal. Firstly, while the Reserve Bank never actually officially declared the start of a downswing, by other important measures a downswing did actually occur. It is...