It has long been recognized that the Milton Friedman's 1953 essay on economic methodology (or F53, for short) displays open-ended unclarities. For example, the notion of "unrealistic assumption" plays a role of absolutely fundamental importance in his methodological framework, but the term...

Models have been extensively analysed in economic methodology, notably their degree of ability to provide explanations. This paper takes a complementary, comparative approach, examining theory development in the natural sciences. Examples show how diverse types of evidence combine with causal...

South Africa is a developing country faced with diverse challenges like high unemployment, poverty, inequality and low economic growth. In an attempt to address these issues, government can embark on borrowing and incur public debt. Countries that run large persistent public debt signal negative...

This paper investigates the link between oil price uncertainty shocks and key macroeconomic indicators of a net oil importing country, South Africa. Monthly data covering the period 1990:01 to 2015:12 is used. The Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) methodology is applied incorporating...

The main objective of this paper was to establish which behavioural finance biases are associated with a certain level of risk tolerance and investor personality. Furthermore, the study aimed to indicate how these behavioural finance biases can influence investment decisions. Since behavioural...

This paper investigates the factors that determine capital structures of financial firms using two separate samples of banks and insurance companies and draws comparisons therefrom. It utilizes two samples of 16 South African banks and 26 South African insurance companies for the period...

This paper argues that the link between poverty and drug-related crime might be spurious. We take an empirical approach to investigate the causality and plausibility of this link. Firstly, we regress crime against envisaged explanatory variables in order to estimate the contribution of poverty...

This paper is the second paper in a series of papers on Community Economic Development Strategic Framework for Poverty Alleviation in Local Government with particular attention to the Raymond Mhlaba Local Municipality (RMLM). The objective of this paper is twofold: (i) to examine the rationale...

The banking industry is the engine of economic activities of the modern day financial systems. As such, banks play a very significant part in supporting economic growth through the efficient allocation of resources and risk diversification in an environment of optimal interest rate spread....

This paper investigates the effect of Co-operative Incentive Scheme (CIS) on beneficiary firms' job creation capacity and presents empirical evidence generated from operation of the CIS aimed at supporting co-operative enterprises in South Africa. The paired-sample t-tests were applied in...