The paper analyses the structure of returns comovements and the volatility spillovers among the African stock markets using daily data for the period 2000-2010. We particularly focus on two issues: whether the stock markets of countries with close trading and financial links are more...

This paper examines the strength of association between the outcomes of National Research Foundation (NRF) peer review based rating mechanisms, and a range of objective measures of performance of researchers. The analysis is conducted on 1932 scholars that have received an NRF rating or an NRF...

The purpose of the study is to examine whether financial reforms implemented in the 1980's and 1990's altered the pattern of aggregate consumption behaviour in Malawi. More specifically, the study questions whether financial reforms affected consumption behaviour by reducing the excess...

Commodity terms of trade shocks have continued to drive macroeconomic ‡uctuations in most emerging market economies. The volatility and persistence of these shocks have posed great challenges for monetary policy. This study employs a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium...

The aim of this paper is deceptively simple: What has war achieved in Africa in the last two hundred years? What have the wagers of war aimed to achieve, even if they did not succeed? Why and in what ways has violence failed? This paper represents a preliminary attempt to explore what can...

This paper analyzes the eect of the average level of intelligence on different measures of the quality of institutions, using a 2006 cross-sectional sample of 113 countries. The results show that average IQ positively affects all the measures of institutional quality considered in our study,...

South Africa faces the dual problem of large inflows of illegal immigrants and outflows of skilled emigrants. This situation potentially has serious implications for the domestic labour market and economy as a whole. In this paper we measure the impact of skilled emigration and the subsequent...

Central bankers generally prefer to reduce inflation gradually. We show that a central bank may try to convince the private sector of its commitment to price stability by choosing to reduce inflation quickly. We call this "teaching by doing". We find that allowing for teaching by doing effects...

In the 2008 Budget Review, the South African government announced its intention to levy a 2c/kWh tax on the sale of electricity generated from non-renewable sources. This measure is intended to serve a dual purpose of helping to manage the current electricity supply shortages and to protect the...

According to the harmonic sequence paradox (Blavatskyy 2006), an expected utility decision maker's willingness to pay for a gamble whose expected payoffs evolve according to the harmonic series is finite if and only if his marginal utility of additional income becomes eventually zero. Since the...