In this paper we test the forecasting ability of three estimated financial conditions indices (FCIs) with respect to key macroeconomic variables of output growth, inflation and interest rates. We do this by forecasting the aforementioned macroeconomic variables based on the information contained...

This paper investigates the existence of significant spillovers from the housing sector onto the wider economy for the seven major OECD countries using Uhlig's (2005) agnostic identification procedure. This method allows identifying a housing demand shock in a six-variable VAR model by imposing...

This paper investigates the existence of spillovers from stock prices onto consumption and the interest rate for South Africa using a time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model with stochastic volatility. In this regard, we estimate a three-variable TVP-VAR model comprising of real...

This paper examines the housing-output growth nexus in South Africa by accounting for the time variation in the causal link with a bootstrapped rolling Granger non-causality test. We use quarterly data on real gross domestic product, real house prices, real gross fixed capital formation and...

This paper examines the impact of real effective exchange rate uncertainty on aggregate exports of South Africa for the period 1986Q4-2013Q2. We use a bivariate framework where the structural vector autoregression is modified to accommodate bivariate GARCH-in-Mean errors. We find that exchange...

Given the rapid rise and volatility of oil prices, the paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on the South African manufacturing production using monthly observations covering the period 1974:02 to 2012:12. In addition, we quantify the responses of manufacturing production to...

The negative consequences of financial instability for the world economy during the recent financial crisis have highlighted the need for a better understanding of financial conditions. We use a financial conditions index (FCI) for South Africa previously constructed from 16 financial variables...

The significant change in South Africa’s trade patterns over the past two decades should affect the impact of shocks in the rest of the world on the country, since South Africa is a small open economy. We investigate the effect with the use of a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model from...

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...

This paper investigates the existence of spillovers from the housing sector onto consumption and the interest rate for South Africa using a time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model with stochastic volatility. In this regard, we estimate a three-variable TVP-VAR model comprising of real...