In this paper, we investigate the robustness of the relationship between trade openness and long-run economic growth over the sample period 1960–2000, utilising Bayesian model averaging techniques to account for model uncertainty issues in a systematic manner. We find no evidence that trade...

In this paper, we evaluate the role of using consumer price index (CPI) disaggregated data to improve the accuracy of inflation forecasts. Our forecasting approach is based on extracting the factors from the subcomponents of the CPI at the highest degree of disaggregation. The data set contains...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of structural breaks in forecasting stock return volatility using both in-sample and out-of-sample tests applied to daily returns of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) All Share Index from 07/02/1995 to 08/25/2010. We find evidence of structural...

The New Keynesian Phillips curve implies that the output gap, the deviation of the actual output from its natural level due to nominal rigidities, drives the dynamics of inflation relative to expected inflation and lagged inflation. This paper exploits the empirical success of the New Keynesian...

Macroeconomic policy decisions in real-time are based on the assessment of current and future economic conditions. Crucially, these assessments are made difficult by the presence of incomplete and noisy data. The problem is more acute for emerging market economies, where most economic data are...

The paper develops a Small Open Economy New Keynesian DSGE-VAR (SOENKDSGE-VAR) model of the South African economy, characterised by incomplete pass-through of exchange rate changes, external habit formation, partial indexation of domestic prices and wages to past inflation, and staggered price...

This paper introduces a formal method of combining expert and model density forecasts when the sample of past forecasts is unavailable. It works directly with the expert forecast density and endogenously delivers weights for forecast combination, relying on probability rules only. The empirical...

We estimate a small DSGE model by full information Bayesian techniques on the basis of Israeli data from 1995 to 2006. The model was first developed and estimated by means of classical GMM in Argov and Elkayam (2010), and since then it has been used at the Bank of Israel for monetary policy...

The objective of this paper is to examine the government revenue and expenditure relationship in the context of what is known as the soft and hard budget constraint strategy. We adopt a nonlinear framework with structural breaks and focus our empirical analysis in three countries. Two of them...

This study examines the short- and the long-run relationship between electricity demand and its determinants in the Iranian residential sector. The study employs unit root tests, cointegration and error-correction models on annual time series for the period, 1967–2009. The results show that...