A sizeable literature examines exchange rate pass-through to disaggregated import prices but very few micro-studies focus on consumer prices. This paper explores exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices in South Africa during 2002-2007, using a unique data set of highly disaggregated data...

In this Paper, we analyse the implications of price setting restrictions for the conduct of cyclical fiscal and monetary policy. We consider an environment with monopolistic competitive firms, a shopping time technology, prices set one period in advance, and government expenditures that must be...

How should monetary and fiscal policy react to adverse financial shocks? If monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate, subsidising the interest rate on loans is the optimal policy. The subsidies can mimic movements in the interest rate and can therefore...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, but this fact is ignored in most work on consumer price inflation. Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates, or CPIX) for South Africa are modeled separately...

We derive principles of optimal short run monetary policy in a real business cycles model, with money and with monopolistic firms that set prices one period in advance. The only distortionary policy intruments are the nominal interest rates and the money supplies. In this environment it is...

We consider standard cash-in-advance monetary models and show that there are interest rate or money supply rules such that equilibria are unique. The existence of these single instrument rules depends on whether the economy has an infinite horizon or an arbitrarily large but finite horizon.

In contrast to the recent literature on the optimal inflation tax, we show that, in models where money reduces transactions costs, it is optimal to set the inflation tax to zero when seigniorage is replaced by revenue from distortionary taxes. The main reasons for this result are that the...

It is difficult to obtain reliable measures of evolving openness to trade, despite its relevance to models of growth, inflation and exchange rates. Our innovative technique measures trade openness encompassing both observable trade policy (tariffs and surcharges) and unobservable trade policy...

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 assesses the relevance of the exchange rate regime for stabilization policy. This regime question cannot be dealt with independently of other institutions, in particular how fiscal policy is designed. We show that once fiscal policy is taken into account, the exchange rate regime is...