This paper examines the impact of oil price uncertainty on South Africa’s stock returns using weekly data that covers the period 1995:07:01 to 2014:08:30. The measure of oil price uncertainty is the conditional standard deviation of the one-step-ahead forecast error for the change in the price...

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 study investigates the predictability of 11 industrialized stock returns with emphasis on the role of U.S. returns. Using monthly data spanning 1980:2 to 2014:12, we show that there exist multiple structural breaks and nonlinearities in the data. Therefore, we employ methods that are...

We study the response of South African monetary policy decisions to foreign monetary policy shocks. We estimate the extent of foreign monetary policy pass-through by augmenting standard Taylor rules and comparing the results within the context of a Global New-Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General...

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...

The recent commodity price boom has spurred interest to understand determinants of commodity price movements. This paper investigates the causal relationship between oil prices and the prices of 25 other commodities, which include both metals and agricultural products, in the presence of...

This study applies the recently developed bootstrap panel causality test proposed by Kónya (2006) to investigate the causal link between happiness and smoking using per capita cigarette consumption and happiness index for 5 countries (i.e. Japan, France, Germany, the UK, and the US) over the...

The paper empirically analyzes the effect of oil price shocks on China’s economy with special interest in the response of the Chinese interest rate to those shocks. Using different econometric models, i) a time-varying parameter structural vector autoregression (TVP SVAR) model with short-run...

This paper examines the dynamic causal relationship between global oil price and South Africa’s food price using both full sample and time varying Granger causality tests. Monthly data from 2000:1 to 2014:6 is used. Result from the linear full sample Granger causality result shows no evidence...

Oil prices have become increasingly important to determine indicators such as inflation; this in turn affects savings and investments. This paper investigates the impact of the volatility of oil prices on savings in South Africa using quarterly data covering the period 1960 to 2014. The study...