This article examines the co-movement between a leading first-world economy (Germany) and an emerging market economy (South Africa) by applying a dynamic factor model. These countries have been chosen as proxies to analyse the channels of transmission of positive supply and demand shocks in...

Ample psychological evidence suggests that people’s learning behavior is often prone to a "myside bias" or "irrational belief persistence" in contrast to learning behavior exclusively based on objective data. In the context of Bayesian learning such a bias may result in diverging...

The maintenance of price stability is widely recognised as the primary goal of modern monetary policy, and the management of private sector inflation expectations has become an essential channel through which this goal is achieved. This evaluation aims to improve the understanding of how the...

Commentators claim a shortage of skills, particularly artisanal labour, in South Africa is constraining output and that a rise in skill supply would benefit less skilled occupations. This assumes/implies skilled and unskilled labour are q-complements. This paper estimates Hicks Elasticities of...

This paper attempts to isolate the conditions that give rise to loss leader pricing. I show that for sufficiently low distance between firms, the advertised good is priced below cost irrespective of whether firms advertise the same or different products. Instead, if products are sufficiently...

A large number of child deaths in developing countries could be averted if ill children received care sooner rather than later. This paper analyses the healthcare treatment pathway that is followed for children under the age of six. The majority of these children receive treatment within 24...

The high rate of unemployment in South Africa stands out in an otherwise vastly improved set of macroeconomic fundamentals compared to the situation in the early 1990s. One might be tempted to argue that by this single indicator alone, government policies such as GEAR have been a failure. This...

This paper tests for the impact of survivorship bias by building on the work of Cubbin, Eidne, Firer and Gilbert (2006), and Bailey and Gilbert (2007). The former paper confirmed the existence of mean reversion on the JSE Securities Exchange, because portfolios of shares with high Price to...

We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2002. The results - based initially on time-series and then on panel time-series data and analysis, and robust for different estimators and financial...

In 1994, South Africa adopted the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and emphasised the delivery of services to meet basic needs. Since then, great strides have been made to redress past social inequalities. However, analysis of these successes have been limited to national or...