This paper provides an empirical analysis of the role of house prices in determining the dynamic behaviour of consumption in South Africa using a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) approach to provincial level panel data covering the period of 1996 to 2010. With the shocks being identified using...

The purpose of the study is to examine whether financial reforms implemented in the 1980s and 1990s altered the pattern of aggregate consumption behaviour in Malawi. More specifically, the study questions whether financial reforms affected consumption behaviour by reducing the excess sensitivity...

This paper compares the effects of real house price and real stock price shocks on consumption decisions in South Africa over the period 1966 to 2012 using a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) approach.The sample comprises quarterly, seasonally adjusted South African data on consumption,...

This paper first tests the restrictions implied by Hall’s (1978) version of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) obtained from a bivariate system of labor income and savings, using quarterly data over the period of 1947:01 to 2008:03 for the US economy, and then uses the model to forecast...

This paper tests for house price bubbles in the South African housing market, using quarterly data from 1969:Q2 to 2009:Q3, based on the unit root test developed by Phillips et al. 2010. This test allows us to detect whether a bubble exists or not, as well as the date of emergence and collapse...

This paper empirically examines the long-run impact and short-term dynamics of housing wealth and financial wealth on household consumption in South Africa using annual provincial-level panel data for the period 1995 to 2011. Based on available data, recently developed econometric techniques for...

This paper applies a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) approach to estimate the relative effects of housing and stock prices on US consumption over time. We use annual data from 1890 to 2012 and find that over different horizons and over time, generally the housing price...

The real interest rate is a very important variable in the transmission of monetary policy. It features in vast majority of financial and macroeconomic models. Though the theoretical importance of the real interest rate has generated a sizable literature that examines its long-run properties,...

The Feldstein-Horioka (FH) puzzle, that is the strong correlation between saving and investment in a world where obstacles to capital mobility are limited, has been studied extensively since it was exposed in 1980. Even though the theoretical and empirical literature has examined many of its...

This paper develops and estimates an open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of South Africa. We devote special attention to the impact of stock price wealth effects on output and the interest rate. For this reason we adopt a perpetual youth approach, which allows for a limited...