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...

This paper shows that the structural breaks are an important characteristic of the monthly labor force participation rate (LFPR) series of Australia, Canada and the USA. Therefore we allow for endogenously determined multiple structural breaks in the empirical specifications of fractionally...

A close examination of the MENA region economies reveals a number of fundamental sources of macroeconomic fluctuations. These include economic factors such as exchange rate instability, large public debt, current account deficits, and escalation of inflation. The political factors such as...

This paper utilises the newly proposed nonparametric causality-in-quantiles test to examine the predictability of mean and variance of changes in gold prices based on inflation for G7 countries. The causality-in-quantiles approach permits us to test for not only causality in mean but also...

This paper aims to analyze the time-varying effects of renewable energy consumption on economic growth and vice versa for the G-7 countries. To this end, the historical decomposition method with bootstrap is utilized. The findings show that the effect of economic growth on renewable energy...

This paper examines the predictive power of oil price for gold price using the novel nonparametric causality-in-quantiles testing approach. The study uses weekly data over the April 1983-August 2016 period for both the spot and 1-month to 12-month futures markets. The new approach, the...

The thesis comprises of six independent chapters with the common theme of financial repression and liberalization. Financial repression consists of the following three elements: First, the banking system is forced to hold government bonds and money through the imposition of high reserve and...

We examine dynamic correlations between housing market returns and economic policy uncertainty in the United States. Our findings suggest that correlations are time-varying and sensitive to economic fundamentals and US recessions.

The transition from Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has substantially shifted the policy debate from growth to inclusive growth. In this short note, we revisit the trust-growth nexus by exploiting a dataset on quality of growth (QG), recently made...