This paper describes the characteristics and comovement of cycles in house prices, residential investment, credit, interest rates, and real activity in advanced economies during the past 25 years. Stylized facts and regularities are uncovered using a dynamic generalized factor model and...

This paper studies the trade linkages between South Africa and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries. We apply a global vector autoregressive model (global VAR) to investigate the degree of trade linkages and shock transmission between South Africa and the BRIC countries over the...

This paper examines the impact of the monetary policy instrument, the repo rate, mainly on output gap and inflation rate in South Africa, over the period 1998– 2008. Use is made of a simple structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) framework in assessing the impulse response functions (IRFs) of...

French economic activity is significantly affected by economic activity in the rest of the world. In recent years, the export performance of France relative to its own past and relative to a major trading partner, Germany, deteriorated. That deterioration seems related to the trend growth of...

This paper studies volatility comovement in world equity markets between 1994 and 2008. Global volatility factors are extracted from a panel of monthly volatility proxies relating to 25 developed and 20 emerging stock markets. A dynamic factor model (FM) is estimated using two-year rolling...

This paper studies domestic volatility transmission in an emerging economy. Daily volatility spillover indices, relating to South African (SA) currencies, bonds and equities, are estimated using variance decompositions from a generalised vector autoregressive (GVAR) model (Pesaran and Shin...