Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, a fact often neglected in modelling consumer price inflation. This study, the first of its kind for an emerging market country, investigates gains to inflation forecast accuracy by aggregating weighted forecasts of the sub-component price indices,...

Models for the twelve-month-ahead US rate of inflation, measured by the chain weighted consumer expenditure deflator, are estimated for 1974-99 and subsequent pseudo out-of-sample forecasting performance is examined. Alternative forecasting approaches for different information sets are compared...

Inflation targeting central banks will be hampered without good models to assist them to be forward-looking. Many current inflation models fail to forecast turning points adequately, because they miss key underlying long-run influences. The world is on the cusp of a dramatic turning point in...

The purpose in this letter is first to review briefly the empirical results on the relationship between real interest rates and real exchange rates; this empirical literature provides little support for the hypothesis of Roll that expected real interest rates are equal in general. Our second aim...

Understanding how import prices adjust to exchange rates helps anticipate inflation effects and monetary policy responses. This paper examines exchange rate passthrough to the monthly import price index in South Africa during 1980-2009. A methodological innovation allows various short-run...

This paper derives the asymptotic distribution for a number of rank-based and classical residual specification tests in AR-GARCH type models. We consider tests for the null hypotheses of no linear and quadratic serial residual autocorrelation, residual symmetry, and no structural breaks. For...

Time series models are often adopted for forecasting because of their simplicity and good performance. The number of parameters in these models increases quickly with the number of variables modelled, so that usually only univariate or small-scale multivariate models are considered. Yet, data...

This paper asks two questions. First, can we detect empirically whether the shocks recovered from the estimates of a structural VAR are truly structural? Second, can the problem of non-fundamentalness be solved by considering additional information? The answer to the first question is 'yes' and...

This paper uses a structural, large dimensional factor model to evaluate the role of 'news' shocks (shocks with a delayed effect on productivity) in generating the business cycle. We find that (i) existing small-scale VECM models are affected by 'non-fundamentalness' and therefore fail to...