We investigate the diversification benefits and optimal portfolio allocation across different US asset classes. Our results from applying the principal component analysis (PCA) show that although there is an increasing trend in market integration, five major financial markets (equities, bonds,...

This article attempts to examine whether the equity premium in the United States can be predicted from a comprehensive set of 18 economic and financial predictors over a monthly out-of-sample period of 2000:2 to 2011:12, using an in-sample period of 1990:2-2000:1. To do so, we consider, in...

We examine the long term investment problem, under stochastic interest and inflation rates and incompleteness. Four basic financial assets are available on the financial market: a money market account (the cash), a real consumption good, a financial stock index and a bond with constant maturity....

Although policymakers and practitioners are particularly interested in DSGE models, these are typically too stylized to be applied directly to the data and often yield weak prediction re- sults. Very recently, hybrid DSGE models have become popular for dealing with some of the model...

Micro-founded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models appear to be particularly suited for evaluating the consequences of alternative macroeconomic policies. Recently, increasing efforts have been undertaken by policymakers to use these models for forecasting, although this proved...

In ation forecasts are a key ingredient for monetary policymaking - especially in an in ation targeting country such as South Africa. Generally, a typical Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) only includes a core set of variables. As such, other variables,e.g. such as alternative...

We develop models for examining possible predictors of the return on gold that embrace six global factors (business cycle, nominal, interest rate, commodity, exchange rate and stock price factors) and two uncertainty indices (the Kansas City Fed’s financial stress index and the U.S. Economic...

The stochastic dominance ordering over probability distributions is one of the most familiar concepts in economic and financial analysis. One difficulty with stochastic dominance is that many distributions are not ranked at all, even when arbitrarily close to other distributions that are....

Institutional investors are predominant on the financial markets and are becoming more active in their portfolio management. This article attempts to enhance our understanding of the incidence of shareholder activism on market reaction in the wake of seve

Market efficiency is among the foremost criteria for making investment decisions when foreign investors attempt to allocate their funds to emerging market assets. If the markets under consideration are efficient, quoted prices of the assets will serve as useful and reliable signals for capital...