Two recent studies have found markedly different measures of the welfare cost of inflation in South Africa, obtained through the estimation of long-run money demand relationships using cointegration and long-horizon approaches. Realizing that the monetary aggregate and the interest rate...

The literature on causality takes contradictory stands regarding the direction of causal relationships based on whether one uses temporally aggregated or systematically sampled data. Using the relationship between a nominal target and the instrument used to achieve it, as an example, we show...

Information on economic policy uncertainty (EPU) does matter in predicting oil returns especially when accounting for omitted nonlinearities in the relationship between these two variables via a time-varying coefficient approach. In this work, we compare the forecastability of standard, Bayesian...

Information on economic policy uncertainty (EPU) does matter in predicting oil returns especially when accounting for omitted nonlinearities in the relationship between these two variables via a time-varying coe¢ cient approach. In this work, we compare the forecastability of standard, Bayesian...

Evidence in favour of the monetary model of exchange rate determination for the South African Rand is at best mixed. A co-integrating relationship between the nominal exchange rate and fundamentals forms the basis of the monetary model. With the econometric literature suggesting that it is the...

The global financial crisis that began in 2007-08 demonstrated how severe the impact of financial markets’ stress on real economic activity can be. In the wake of the financial crisis policy-makers and decision-makers across the world identified the critical need for a better understanding of...

This paper evaluates the ability of Bayesian shrinkage-based dynamic predictive regression models estimated with hierarchical priors (Adaptive Jefferys, Adaptive Student-t, Lasso, Fussed Lasso and Elastic Net priors) and non-hierarchical priors (Gaussian, Lasso-LARS, Lasso-Landweber) in...

In ation forecasts are a key ingredient for monetary policymaking - especially in an in ation targeting country such as South Africa. Generally, a typical Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) only includes a core set of variables. As such, other variables,e.g. such as alternative...

The 2006 sudden and immense downturn in U.S. House Prices sparked the 2007 global financial crisis and revived the interest about forecasting such imminent threats for economic stability. In this paper we propose a novel hybrid forecasting methodology that combines the Ensemble Empirical Mode...

Forecasting aggregate retail sales may improve portfolio investors’ ability to predict movements in the stock prices of the retailing chains. Therefore, this paper uses 26 (23 single and 3 combination) forecasting models to forecast South Africa’s aggregate seasonal retail sales. We use data...