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...

In this paper we analyze disinflation policy when a central bank has imperfect information about private sector inflation expectations but learns about them from economic outcomes, which are in part the result of the disinflation policy itself. The form of uncertainty is manifested as...

The conventional view is that a monetary policy shock has both supply-side and demand-side effects, at least in the short run. Barth and Ramey (2001) show that the supply-side effect of a monetary policy shock may be greater than the demand-side effect. We argue that it is crucial for monetary...

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,...

The Dutch disease argument suggests that in commodity exporting countries "overvaluation" of the currency due to increases in commodity prices harms manufacturing even though the economy as a whole benefits, led by the booming natural resources sector. The relationship between the real exchange...

This paper constructs a number of possible core measures of annual inflation using Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA). Annual inflation is decomposed into its trend, oscillating and noise components in order to develop an understanding of the trend and cyclicality in South African headline...

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...

In this paper we study concentration in the European Internet upstream access market. The possibility of measuring market concentration depends on a correct definition of the market itself; however, this is not always possible, since, as it is the case of the Internet industry, very often...

This paper reports a comparison of South African household inflation expectations and inflation credibility surveys undertaken in 2006 and 2008. The objective is to test for possible feed-through between inflating credibility and inflation expectations. It supplements similar earlier research...

This paper attempts to answer question similar to that asked by Ireland (2003): What explains the correlations between nominal and real variables in postwar US data? More precisely, this paper aims to investigate whether endogenous money, sticky wages, or some combination of the two, are...