The persistence property of inflation is an important issue for not only economists, but, especially for central banks, given that the degree of inflation persistence determines the extent to which central banks can control inflation. Also, not only is the level of inflation persistence that is...

We examine the high-frequency response of the rand-dollar nominal rate within ten-minute intervals around five minutes before, five minutes after) official inflation announcements, and show that the rand appreciates (respectively, depreciates) on impact when inflation is higher (respectively,...

This study assesses debt sustainability in South Africa allowing for possible nonlinearities in the form of threshold behaviour by fiscal authorities. A long historical data series on the debtto- GDP ratio and models with fixed and time-varying thresholds allowing the level of debt to vary...

This paper assesses the impact of uncertainty about the true state of the economy on monetary policy in South Africa since the adoption of inflation targeting. The paper also analyses the impact of uncertainty about the conditions in financial markets on the interest rate setting behavior that...

This study determines whether the global vector autoregressive (GVAR) approach provides better forecasts of key South African variables than a vector error correction model (VECM) and a Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) model augmented with foreign variables. The paper considers both a small...

A simple empirical nonlinear framework is used to analyse monetary policy between 1983 and 2007 in South Africa, focusing on the policy of in?ation targeting introduced in Feb 2000, more precisely when the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) announced that an inflation zone targeting regime of...

In order to address practical questions in credit portfolio management it is necessary to link the cyclical or systematic components of firm credit risk with the firm’s own idiosyncratic credit risk as well as the systematic credit risk component of every other exposure in the portfolio. This...

In this paper we provide an in-sample assessment of how the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) sets policy rate in the context of both linear and nonlinear Taylor type rule models of monetary policy. Given the controversial debate on whether central banks should target asset prices for economic...

This paper is the ?rst one to analyze the ability of linear and nonlinear monetary policy rule specifications as well as nonparametric and semiparametric models in forecasting the nominal interest rate setting that describes the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) policy decisions. We augment the...

We test the concept of the Opportunistic Approach to monetary policy in South Africa post 2000 inflation targeting regime. Our findings support the two features of the opportunistic approach. First, we find that the models that include an intermediate target that reflects the recent history of...