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...

Inflation forecasts are a key ingredient for monetary policymaking - especially in an inflation targeting country such as South Africa. Generally, a typical Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) only includes a core set of variables. As such, other variables,e.g. such as alternative...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic relationship between different oil price shocks and the South African stock market using a sign restriction structural vector autoregression (VAR) approach for the period 1973:01 to 2011:07. The results show that for an oil-importing country like South...

Empirical evidence on the effect of defense spending on US output is at best mixed. Against this backdrop, this paper assesses the impact of a positive defense spending shock on the growth rate of real GNP using a FAVAR model estimated with 116 variables spanning the quarterly period of 1976:01...

This paper assesses the impact of monetary policy on house price inflation for the nine census divisions of the US economy using a factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR), estimated a large data set comprising of 126 quarterly series over the period 1976:01 to 2005:02. The results based on the impulse...

This paper assesses the impact of a monetary policy shock on 15 key macroeconomic variables of South Africa, in the pre- and post-inflation targeting periods. For this purpose, we use a Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) model comprising of 107 monthly time series over two equal...

We employ a 10-variable dynamic structural general equilibrium model to forecast the US real house price index as well as its turning point in 2006:Q2. We also examine various Bayesian and classical time-series models in our forecasting exercise to compare to the dynamic stochastic general...

This paper assesses the impact of monetary policy on real house price growth in South Africa using a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR), estimated based on a large data set comprising of 246 quarterly series over the period 1980:01 to 2006:04. The results based on the impulse...

We implement several Bayesian and classical models to forecast housing prices in 20 US states. In addition to standard vector-autoregressive (VAR) and Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) models, we also include the information content of 308 additional quarterly series in some models. Several...