Employing a dynamic model that captures herding under different market regimes we provide novel evidence on the herding behavior of US-listed Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). Our sample is extensive and covers the period from 2/1/2004 to 28/6/2013. Estimates of herding behavior are derived...

This paper examines the causal relationship between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and equity market uncertainty (EMU) in the US using linear and nonlinear Granger causality tests. We use daily data on the newly developed indexes by Baker et al. (2013) covering 1985:01:01 to 2013:06:14....

This paper examines the causal link between economic policy uncertainty and stock returns in China and India, using bootstrap Granger full-sample causality test and sub-sample rolling window estimation. We use monthly data covering from 1995:02 to 2013:02 for China and 2003:02-2013:02 for India....

This article attempts to examine whether the equity premium in the United States can be predicted from a com-prehensive set of 18 economic and financial predictors over a monthly out-of-sample period of 2000:2 to 2011:12, using an in-sample period of 1990:2-2000:1. To do so, we consider, in...

This paper uses a predictive regression framework to examine the out-of-sample predictability of South Africa’s equity premium, using a host of financial and macroeconomic variables. Past studies tend to suggest that the predictors on their own fail to deliver consistent out-of-sample forecast...

One characteristic of many macroeconomic and financial time series is their asymmetric behaviour during different phases of a business cycle. Oil price shocks have been amongst those economic variables that have been identified in theoretical and empirical literature to predict the phases of...

We emphasize the role of news-based economic policy and equity market uncertainty indices as robust drivers of oil price fluctuations. In that, we utilizea new hybrid nonparametric quantile causality methodology in order to investigate whether EPU and EMU uncertainty measures incorporate...

The negative consequences of financial instability for the world economy during the recent financial crisis have highlighted the need for a better understanding of financial conditions. We use a financial conditions index (FCI) for South Africa previously constructed from 16 financial variables...

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...

In this paper we test the forecasting ability of three estimated financial conditions indices (FCIs) with respect to key macroeconomic variables of output growth, inflation and interest rates. We do this by forecasting the aforementioned macroeconomic variables based on the information contained...