The first essay introduces a Bayesian logistic smooth transition vector autoregression (LSTVAR) approach to investigating the impact of international business cycles on the UK economy. We find that the British business cycle is asymmetrically influenced by growth in the US, France and Germany....

The first essay attempts to explain how the economy responds to transient exogenous exchange rate and cost-push shocks using a small open economy New Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium model that incorporates prices and wage stickiness and cost channel of interest rate to inflation. The model...

This thesis investigates impacts of oil price on monetary policy in oil-exporting countries.The second chapter reviews the forward-looking new Keynesian model, to show the need for credibility and conservativeness in order to have less inflation, which are the theoretical foundations of central...

In the literature, many statistical models have been used to investigate the existence of a deterministic time trend, changing persistence and nonlinearity in macroeconomic and financial data. Good understanding of these properties in a univariate time series model is crucial when making...

In this paper we examine several approaches to detecting changes in the adjustment coefficients in cointegrated VARs. We adopt recursive and rolling techniques as mis-specification tests for the detection of non-constancy and the estimation of the breakpoints. We find that inspection of the...

Evidence in the literature points to a puzzling initial increase in inflation after an increase in nominal interest rates. This can be explained by the fact that firms have to borrow money to pay wages in advance, i.e., by the cost channel. In this paper, the study of the cost channel is...

This thesis focuses on financial development, economic growth and market volatility in Nigeria and South Africa. For Nigeria, the thesis examines the long-run causality between financial development and economic growth. It uses three measures of financial development: financial development index...

Similar to global currencies, the Zambian currency (kwacha) has varied considerably against major currencies since the early 1990s. Existing empirical evidence reveals that fluctuations in exchange rates can potentially generate distortions in the economy. However, insufficient empirical...