This paper investigates whether changes in monetary transmission mechanism respond to variations in asset prices. We distinguish between bull and bear markets and employ a TVP-VAR approach with stochastic volatility to assess the evolution of the monetary policy in relation to housing and stock...

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...

Empirical evidence on the whether the inflation-targeting South African Reserve Bank (SARB) should also consider responding to exchange rate fluctuations, are contradictory. Against this backdrop of contradictory evidence, we revisit the issue by questioning if the inflation rate is more...

This paper estimates the optimal monetary authorities’ response to deviations of inflation and output from their target values for South Africa over the inflation targeting era. This is achieved using an empirical framework that allows the central bank’s policy preferences to be zone-like as...

We explore how the ECB sets interest rates in the context of policy reaction functions. Using both real-time and revised information, we consider linear and nonlinear policy functions in inflation, output and a measure of financial conditions. We find that amongst Taylor rule models, linear and...

Recent empirical evidence on the direct link of inflation targeting and inflation volatility is at best mixed. However, comparing inflation volatility across alternative monetary policy regimes within a country based on conventional ways, used in previous studies, begs the question. The question...

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...

The paper develops a monetary endogenous growth model of a financially repressed small open economy, characterized by curb markets, capital mobility, transaction costs in domestic and for- eign capital markets, and a flexible exchange rate system, to analyze the impact of financial...

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...

The paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium monetary endogenous growth model. The closed economy model is inhabited by consumers, firms, a Cournotian monopolistically compet- itive banking system, besides, an inflation-targeting monetary authority, and, in turn, analyzes the effect of a...