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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...