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...

The oil price-inflation relationship has been at the center of attention among economists and policy makers, especially after 1970’s oil shocks that resulted to a significant increase in the inflation rate in number of countries around the world. In this study, we aim to investigate the...

This paper investigates the direction of temporal causality between budget deficit and interest rate in South Africa using quarterly data for the period of 1961:02 to 2005:04, and also for annual data covering 1961 to 2005. Based on a multivariate Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), estimated...

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 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...

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...

We implement several Bayesian and classical models to forecast employment for eight sectors of the US economy. In addition to standard vector-autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, we also include the information content of 143 additional monthly series in some models. Several...