Forecasting models for output are presented to throw light on monetary transmission. Recent research finds multistep forecasting superior to recursive forecasting from a VAR model when structural breaks are present; there are important political and policy regime breaks in South Africa. The...

This Paper uses multi-step forecasting models at horizons of 4 and 8 quarters to forecast and explain the growth of real per capita US GDP. In the modeling strategy, a priori sign restrictions play an important role. They are imposed not on impulse response functions but directly on the reduced...

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 consumption...

This paper introduces deep habits into a sticky-price sticky-wage economy and asks whether the countercyclical markup movements induced by deep habits is helpful for accounting for the dynamic effects of monetary policy shocks. We find that this is the case: When allowing for deep habits, the...

The SVAR and narrative approaches to estimating tax multipliers deliver significantly different results. The former yields multipliers of about 1 percent, whereas the latter produces much larger multipliers of about 3 percent. The SVAR and narrative approaches differ along two important...

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...

In the context of a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model, we perform classical maximum-likelihood and Bayesian estimations of the contribution of anticipated shocks to business cycles in the postwar United States. Our identification approach relies on the fact that forward-looking...

The great contraction of 2008 pushed the U.S. economy into a protracted liquidity trap (i.e., a long period with zero nominal interest rates and inflationary expectations below target). In addition, the recovery was jobless (i.e., output growth recovered but unemployment lingered). This paper...

We derive a comprehensive one-year ahead forecasting model of US per capita GDP for 1955-2000, collectively examining variables usually considered singly, e.g. interest rates, credit conditions, the stock market, oil prices and the yield gap, of which all, except the last, are found to matter....

This paper proposes a novel international transmission mechanism based on the assumption of deep habits. The term deep habits stands for a preference specification according to which consumers form habits on a good-by-good basis. Under deep habits, firms face more elastic demand functions in...