Global emissions beyond 44 gigatonnes of carbondioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) in 2020 can potentially lead the world to an irreversible climate change. Employing a novel dynamical system modeling approach, we predict that in a business-asusual scenario, it will reach 61 GtCO2e by 2020. Testing...

This policy brief argues in favor of a new urban model that harnesses the power that cities have to curb global warming. Such a model tackles fundamental management challenges in the energy, building and transport sectors to promote the growth of diverse and compact cities. Such a model is...

We introduce machine learning in the context of central banking and policy analyses. Our aim is to give an overview broad enough to allow the reader to place machine learning within the wider range of statistical modelling and computational analyses, and provide an idea of its scope and...

It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...

Risk factors and systematic factor strategies are fast becoming an integral part of the global asset management landscape. In this report, we provide an introduction to, and critique of, the factor investing paradigm in a South African setting. We initially discuss the general factor...

The performance of dynamic trading and investment strategies can be difficult to predict. Although not without its problems, analysis of the historical performance of a strategy can provide valuable insight into its general risk and return properties. Furthermore, historical analysis allows one...

The phrase long-term investing in triple leveraged ETFs is somewhat of an anathema for investment academicians. As a result of daily rebalancing and so-called beta slippage or “the constant leverage trap” it is highly likely over the long term to significantly deviate from the targeted...

Several approaches for subset recovery and improved forecasting accuracy have been proposed and studied. One way is to apply a regularization strategy and solve the model selection task as a continuous optimization problem. One of the most popular approaches in this research field is given by...

The main goal of this paper is to better understand the behavior of credit spreads in the past and the potential risk of unexpected future credit spread changes. One important consideration to note regarding credit spreads is the fact that bond spreads contain a liquidity premium, which...