The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) moved to an official inflation targeting regime in the February of 2000, with the sole aim of maintaining the CPIX inflation between a target-band of three to six percent. Against this backdrop, this thesis, over seven independent chapters with a common...

Recently, financial engineering has brought a significant number of interest rate derivative products. Amongst the variables used in pricing these derivative products is the short-term interest rate. This research article examines various short-term interest rate models in continuous time in...

Since the adoption of inflation rate targeting policy, there has been a great concern on the effectiveness of monetary policy to curb inflation in South Africa. The effectiveness of the repo rate as a policy instrument to control the level of inflation has been widely criticised not only in the...

The current international integration of financial markets provides a channel for currency depreciation to affect stock prices. Moreover, the recent financial crisis in Asia with its accompanying exchange rate volatility affords a case study to examine that channel. This paper applies a...

This paper explores whether a significant long-run relationship exists between money and nominal GDP and between money and the price level in the Venezuelan economy. We apply time-series econometric techniques to annual data for the Venezuelan economy for 1950 to 1996. An important feature of...

We study the effects of trade orientation and human capital on total factor productivity for a pooled cross-section, time-series sample of developed and developing countries. We first estimate total factor productivity from a parsimonious specification of the aggregate production function...

A small, but growing, body of literature searches for evidence of non-Keynesian effects of fiscal contractions. That is, some evidence exists that large fiscal contractions stimulate short-run economic activity. Our paper continues this research effort by systematically examining the effects, if...

We reconsider the optimal central banker contract derived in Walsh (1995). We show that if the government's objective function places weight (value) on the cost of the contract, then the optimal inflation contract does not completely neutralize the inflation bias. That is, a fraction of the...

This paper considers the contacting approach to central banking in the context of a simple common agency model. The recent literature on optimal contracts suggests that the political principal of the central bank can design the appropriate incentive schemes that remedy for time-inconsistency...

Approaching monetary policy as a principal agent problem provides a useful framework for interpreting alternative delegation schemes. In this paper, we consider the effectiveness of central banker incentive schemes when the principal delegates monetary policy through contracts but remains...