This paper presents a detailed empirical examination of the South African equity premium; and a quantitative theoretic exercise to test the canonical inter-temporal consumption-based asset-pricing model under power utility. Over the long run, the South African stock market produced average...

This paper analyses the intertemporal hedging demand for stocks and bonds in South Africa (SA), the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). The analysis is done using an approximate solution method for the optimal consumption and wealth portfolio problem of an infinitely long-lived...

We implement a recursive out-of-sample method to examine anomalies-based ex-ante predictability in the cross-section of stock returns. We obtain a series of simulated out-of-sample returns, consistent with investors using only prior information when choosing predictor variables. We find that, by...

This paper investigates the long-run impact of inflation on homeowner equity in South Africa by analysing the relationship between house prices and the prices of non-housing goods and services. Quarterly data series are collected for the luxury, large middle-segment, medium middle-segment, small...

The Kuznets inequality-development hypothesis can be tested with time-series data rather than the cross-section analyses found in earlier literature. Single-country time-series analysis cannot be done without addressing endogeneity between output and inequality. South Africa has been...

The Feldstein-Horioka (FH) puzzle, that is the strong correlation between saving and investment in a world where obstacles to capital mobility are limited, has been studied extensively since it was exposed in 1980. Even though the theoretical and empirical literature has examined many of its...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the causal relationship between agricultural prices in South Africa and global oil prices. A nonlinear Granger causality test based on moment conditions, introduced by Nishiyama et al (2011) is employed and we find that there is indeed a causal...

Estimates of the output gap are an important component of policy-makers’ toolkits. Both the theory underlying monetary policy analysis and the empirical models employed by central banks suggest that the output gap is a key variable explaining inflation. In this view, the estimate of the...

The significant change in South Africa’s trade patterns over the past two decades should affect the impact of shocks in the rest of the world on the country, since South Africa is a small open economy. We investigate the effect with the use of a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model from...

The conduct of inflation targeting is heavily dependent on accurate inflation forecasts. Non-linear models have increasingly featured, along with linear counterparts, in the forecasting literature. In this study, we focus on forecasting South African infl ation by means of non-linear models and...