This study analyses the relationship between disaggregated credit extension and financial distress in South Africa. It commences by constructing a composite indicator of financial distress and then examines its correlation with components of disaggregated credit extension. Of particular interest...

This paper establishes the prevailing financial factors that influence credit spread variability, and its impact on the U.S. business cycle over the Great Moderation and Great Recession periods. To do so, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium framework with a central role of financial...

This paper revisits the currency crises model of Aghion, Bacchetta and Banerjeee (2000, 2001, 2004), who show that if there exist nominal price rigidities and private sector credit constraints, and the credit multiplier depends on real interest rates, then the optimal monetary policy response to...

This paper studies the role of the equity price channel in business cycle fluctuations, and highlights its systemic risk across all sectors of the economy. We develop a canonical New-Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with a tractable role for the equity market in banking,...

Although informal finance forms a large part of their financial sector, nearly all low income countries exclude informal transactions in official monetary data. Usually, informal finance data are nonexistent and occasionally, they are available only from surveys that often occur at irregular...

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...