In many countries, house prices are subject to boom/bust cycles and in some these are linked to severe economic and financial instability.  Overheating can have both a price and a quantity dimension, but it is likely that they are linked by common drivers.  However, much depends on the...

After the global financial crisis, there is greater awareness of the need to understand the interactions between the financial sector and the real economy and hence the potential for financial instability.  Data from the financial flow of funds, previously relatively neglected, are now seen as...

 We propose a new class of multivariate volatility models utilizing realized measures of asset volatility and covolatility extracted from high-frequency data. Dimension reduction for estimation of large covariance matrices is achieved by imposing a factor structure with time-varying conditional...

There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption.  This paper exploits liquid and illiquid wealth time series from household balance sheet data for South Africa, previously constructed by the authors, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of...

The consumption behaviour of UK, US and Japanese households is examined and compared using a modern Ando-Modigliani style consumption function.  The models incorporate income growth expectations, income uncertainty, housing collateral and other credit effects.  These models therefore capture...

We enrich a baseline RBC model with search and matching frictions on the labor market and real frictions that are helpful in accounting for the response of macroeconomic aggregates to shocks.  The analysis allows shocks to have an unanticipated and a new (i.e. anticipated) component.  The...

Structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models have emerged as a dominant research strategy in empirical macroeconomics, but suffer from the large number of parameters employed and the resulting estimation uncertainty associated with their impulse responses. In this paper we propose...

We build a 4-equation model of the inflation process in South Africa (which has recently adopted inflation targeting), including the exchange rate, consumer prices, producer price, and import prices. This provides useful information on the speed and extent of exchange rate pass-through, and...

This paper asks how well a general equilibrium agency cost model describes the dynamic relationship between credit variables and the business cycle. A Bayesian VAR is used to obtain probability intervals for empirical correlations. The agency cost model is found to predict the leading,...

In this paper we analyse market co-movements during the global financial crisis.  Using high frequency data and accounting for market microstructure noise and non-synchronous trading, interdependencies between differing asset classes such as equity, FX, fixed income, commodity and energy...