Rather than a rigid racial ideology, it is argued that South African apartheid was a pragmatic response of a white oligarchy to changing economic and political constraints. Consequently, the degree to which apartheid principles were applied and enforced by the South African state varied over...

This paper establishes the prevailing financial factors that influence credit spread variability, and its impact on the U.S. business cycle over the Great Moderation and Great Recession periods. To do so, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium framework with a central role of financial...

In this paper, we report a descriptive investigation of the structural evolution of two of the most important over-the-counter markets for liquidity in Germany: the interbank market for credit and for derivatives. We use end-of-quarter data from the German large credit register between 2002 and...

This paper investigates the causes and consequences of colonial Africa’s first financial crash, which happened in South Africa’s Dutch Cape Colony. The 1788–1793 crisis followed a common sequence of events: trade and fiscal deficits were monetized by printing money, credit...

We examine the impact of ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF) on existing cultural measures employed in various social sciences. Not only do high levels of fractionalization affect the use of statistical means to account for cultural distance, we show that it is not constant and therefore...

The study attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of social media on cognitive development among undergraduate economics students at a South African university. The study collects data on student postings to discussion topics posted on Facebook and Twitter. The use of 3 well-known rubrics for...

This paper assesses the extent of trade linkages and shock transmission between African economies and its main trading partners, namely China, Europe and the United States (US). Using the global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model, the paper investigates how shock transmission between Africa and...

This paper presents an application of the conditional logit model to a small, Nelson Mandela Bay neighbourhood housing data set, with the objective of determining the impact of proximity to a low-cost housing development on nearby property prices. The results of this pilot study show that the...

As a result of population aging, governments of many OECD countries have begun to implement policies to increase average retirement ages in an attempt to alleviate some of the Â…nancial strain in supporting retirees. This paper explores the effect that later retirement ages have on aggregate...

This paper analyzes the production process of scientific outputs and its implications on the U.S. economy using variants of a disaggregated Marshallian Macroeconomic Model (MMM). Federal spending on scientific activities produces innovation which we measure using the number of patents awarded....