In <italic>The Construction of Social Reality</italic> (1995), John Searle develops a theory of institutional facts and objects, of which money, borders and property are presented as prime examples. These objects are the result of us <italic>collectively</italic> intending certain natural objects to have a certain status, i.e....

Without a doubt, the 2010 World Cup of soccer in South Africa was a great experience for both soccer fans, who enjoyed a safe and efficiently-run tournament, and their South African hosts. The sporting and social spectacle was broadcast around the world and focused unprecedented media attention...

Determine the optimal response of a small open economy's central bank to financial shocks that lead to increases in credit spreads. Increasing credit spreads reduce the efficacy of monetary policy when the central bank is reducing the policy rate to accommodate a lowering in economic...

The pre-crisis monetary policy consensus has been challenged on a number of fronts. Even the nominal target, around which the modern consensus developed, has been called into question, with a vigorous recent debate ensuing about nominal income targeting as an alternative. This paper contributes...

This research challenges previous findings regarding the robustness of the African growth dummy by expanding the list of variables to include those suggested by Easterly and Levine (1998) and Sachs and Warner (1997b). Using the Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates approach, this paper...

"The paper provides an ex post analysis of the financial burden and economic benefits of the World Cup (WC) in Germany 2006. Based on the usual cost-benefit measures, the experience of WC 2006 appears to be in line with existing empirical research on large sporting events and sports stadiums,...

This paper uses a structural vector-autoregression approach to discuss the cyclicality of fiscal and monetary policy in South Africa since 1994. There is substantial South African literature on this topic, but much disagreement remains. Though not undisputed, there is growing consensus that...

Monetary authorities have been implicated in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. John Muellbauer, for example, has blamed what he thought was initially inadequate policy responses by central banks to the crisis on their models, which are, in his words, 'overdue for the scrap heap'. This paper...

Zambian growth failure is often related to the resource curse. This article evaluates not only this claim, but also whether the new institutional theory can account for Zambia's economic decline. Little empirical support is found for the terms of trade or volatility versions of the resource...