Official balance sheet estimates for the household sector are not currently available in South Africa. Yet with South Africa`s well-developed financial sector and deep capital markets, asset market channels are likely to be important determinants of aggregate consumer spending and saving,...

We build a 4-equation model of the inflation process in South Africa (which has recently adopted inflation targeting), including the exchange rate, consumer prices, producer price, and import prices. This provides useful information on the speed and extent of exchange rate pass-through, and...

This paper proposes that all new euro area sovereign borrowing be in the form of jointly guaranteed Eurobonds.  To avoid classic moral hazard problems and to insure the guarantors against default, each country would pay a risk premium conditional on economic fundamentals to a joint debt...

In many countries, house prices are subject to boom/bust cycles and in some these are linked to severe economic and financial instability.  Overheating can have both a price and a quantity dimension, but it is likely that they are linked by common drivers.  However, much depends on the...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, a fact often neglected in modeling consumer price inflation.  Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates), are modeled separately and forecast,...

After the global financial crisis, there is greater awareness of the need to understand the interactions between the financial sector and the real economy and hence the potential for financial instability.  Data from the financial flow of funds, previously relatively neglected, are now seen as...

Forecasts are presented for the 12-month ahead US rate of inflation measured by the chain weighted personal consumer expenditure deflator, PC, and its three main components: non-durable goods, durable goods and services.  Monthly models are estimated for 1974 to 1999, and pseudo out-of-sample...

This paper presents new models for aggregate UK data on mortgage possessions (foreclosures) and mortgage arrears (payment delinquencies).  The innovations include the treatment of difficuly to observe variations in loan quality and shifts in forbearance policy by lenders, by common latent...

There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption.  This paper exploits liquid and illiquid wealth time series from household balance sheet data for South Africa, previously constructed by the authors, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of...