How detrimental is inflation to growth in South Africa? At what level? Motivated by the adoption of inflation targeting by many countries, this paper sets out to empirically determine the threshold level of inflation in South Africa. This study adopts quarterly time series data spanning over the...

There is growing emphasis on the role played by the private sector in alleviating poverty in Africa. At the same time, greater focus is being placed on cash transfers as a poverty alleviation tool. This paper provides an economic rationale for private sector involvement in the provision of cash...

Using unique retail and wholesale price data for 4,532 products carried by a major Midwestern grocery retailer, we find evidence of significant retail price rigidity during the Thanksgiving through Christmas holiday period relative to the rest of the year. We suggest that this pattern of holiday...

The majority of academic research on central bank communication has analysed a central bank’s audience as a single group. Analyses, especially empirical research have focused almost exclusively on a central bank’s interaction with the financial markets, facilitated by the...

Mankiw and Reis (2002) propose the Sticky Information Phillips Curve as an alternative to the standard New Keynesian Phillips Curve, to address empirical shortcomings in the latter. In this paper, a Sticky Information Phillips curve for South Africa is estimated, which requires data on...

Asymmetric pricing is the phenomenon where prices rise more readily than they fall. We articulate, and provide empirical support for, a theory of asymmetric pricing in wholesale prices. In particular, we show how wholesale prices may be asymmetric in the small but symmetric in the large, when...

In this study, we empirically examine the extent of price rigidity using a unique store-level time series data set - consisting of (i) actual retail transaction prices, (ii) actual wholesale transaction prices which represent both the retailers' costs and the prices received by manufacturers,...

This paper develops a new index of economic uncertainty for South Africa for the period 1990-2014 and analyses the macroeconomic impact of changes in this measure. The index is constructed from three sources: (1) Disagreement among professional forecasters about macroeconomic conditions using...