Real exchange rate misalignment measures deviations of actual real exchange rate from its long-run, or equilibrium, level. Policy makers and many researchers are interested in predicting and monitoring misalignment in the foreign exchange market, because, in many cases, it is closely related to...

A welfare analysis of a risky policy is impossible within a linear or linearized model and its certainty equivalence property. The presented algorithms are designed as a toolbox for a general model class. The computational challenges are considerable and I concentrate on the numerics and...

This paper utilises various recently developed econometric methods to obtain better approximations to the half-life for real exchange rates of ten South African Development Community (SADC) countries and to generate confidence intervals for half-life deviations from the purchasing power parity...

Using one of the key property of copulas that they remain invariant under an arbitrary monotonous change of variable, we investigate the null hypothesis that the dependence between financial assets can be modeled by the Gaussian copula. We find that most pairs of currencies and pairs of major...

This paper builds on Kočenda (2001) and extends it in two ways. First, two new intervals of the proximity parameter ε (over which the correlation integral is calculated) are specified. For these ε- ranges new critical values for various lengths of the data sets are introduced and through...

In recent years two classes of switching models have been proposed, the Markov switching models, Hamilton (1989) and the Threshold Auto- Regressive Models (TAR), Lim and Tong (1980). These two models have the advantage of being able to modelize and capture asymmetry, sudden changes and...

This paper extends and generalizes the BDS test presented by Brock, Dechert, Scheinkman, and LeBaron (1996). In doing so it aims to remove the limitation of having to arbitrarily select a proximity parameter by integrating across the correlation integral. The Monte Carlo simulation is used to...

This paper investigates the existence of spillovers from the housing sector onto consumption and the interest rate for South Africa using a time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model with stochastic volatility. In this regard, we estimate a three-variable TVP-VAR model comprising of real...

Two recent studies have found markedly different measures of the welfare cost of inflation in South Africa, obtained through the estimation of long-run money demand relationships using cointegration and long-horizon approaches. Realizing that the monetary aggregate and the interest rate...

This paper investigates the existence of spillovers from stock prices onto consumption and the interest rate for South Africa using a time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model with stochastic volatility. In this regard, we estimate a three-variable TVP-VAR model comprising of real...