This paper examines the impact of the monetary policy instrument, the repo rate, mainly on output gap and inflation rate in South Africa, over the period 1998– 2008. Use is made of a simple structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) framework in assessing the impulse response functions (IRFs) of...

This paper studies volatility comovement in world equity markets between 1994 and 2008. Global volatility factors are extracted from a panel of monthly volatility proxies relating to 25 developed and 20 emerging stock markets. A dynamic factor model (FM) is estimated using two-year rolling...

This paper uses two-types of large-scale models, namely the Dynamic Factor Model (DFM) and Bayesian Vector Autoregressive (BVAR) Models based on alternative hyperparameters specifying the prior, which accommodates 267 macroeconomic time series, to forecast key macroeconomic variables of a small...

This paper studies the synchronization of economic variables between South Africa and the US. In addition it examines transmission channels through which supply and demand shocks from the US effect economic activity in South Africa. We use a structural dynamic factor model approach, instead of...

Empirical evidence on the effect of defense spending on US output is at best mixed. Against this backdrop, this paper assesses the impact of a positive defense spending shock on the growth rate of real GNP using a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) model estimated with 116 variables...

We implement several Bayesian and classical models to forecast employment for eight sectors of the US economy. In addition to standard vector-autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, we also include the information content of 143 additional monthly series in some models. Several...

The paper characterises domestic and foreign sources of volatility transmission for South African (SA) bonds, commodities, currencies, and equities. We introduce a small-open-economy extension of the volatility spillover model proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012). Based on generalised variance...