Despite convergence pressures, differences in housing and financial market institutions across the 15 member states of the European Union are still enormous. This paper argues that they have profound effects on the responsiveness of output and inflation in the different countries to changes in...

Housing markets have multiple interactions with the rest of the economy and these are surveyed in this paper. The drivers of house prices include income, the housing stock, demography, credit availability, interest rates, and lagged appreciation, the latter a potential mechanism for...

Under inflation targeting in South Africa, it is important to monitor and forecast changes in prices, not only for aggregate measures of the consumer price index, but also its underlying sub-components. Hypotheses about sectoral transmission of policy and shocks are often more specific than...

South Africa’s recent adoption of inflation targeting increases the need for good forecasting models of inflation and models for understanding the monetary transmission mechanism. This paper presents multi-step models for inflation and output, four-quarters ahead. The inflation model has...

South Africa experienced substantial rises in the ratios of consumption and household debt to income from 1983, for which conventional explanations in terms of income, income expectations, interest rates and wealth prove inadequate. This paper emphasizes the role of substantial financial...