An estimate of the persistence of inflation captures the long-run effects of a shock on inflation. A better understanding of the persistence of inflation can be useful for a variety of reasons. Firstly, a persistence measure can provide important information about the likely impact of shocks on...

The Basel Accords promote the adoption of capital adequacy requirements to increase the banking sector's stability. Unfortunately, this type of regulation can hamper economic growth by shifting banks' portfolios from more productive, risky investment projects toward less productive but safer...

We examine how poor macroeconomic performance, mainly in the role of high rates of inflation, affected earnings inequality in the 1980s and early 1990s in Brazil. The results based initially on aggregate time-series, and then on the relatively novel sub-national panel time-series data and...

There is presently considerable debate about the application and interpretation of realism in economics. Interest in this area of the philosophy and methodology of economics has intensified over the last twenty years, especially due to the substantial contributions by Uskali Mäki and Tony...

Most historians regard the Cape Colony of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an impoverished and destitute settlement, primarily because of the many restrictions and prohibitions enforced by the Dutch East India Company, who founded the Cape settlement as a refreshment station for its...

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 macro-economic variables of a small...

The focus of this paper is on the presence of economies of scale in administering pension funds. We make use of a unique dataset with extensive information on South African retirement funds from 1996 to 2006. For almost fifty years now, South Africa has operated under a system with small social...

The emphasis on location-specific factors, such as climate or disease environment, in the explanation of development outcomes in colonial societies implicitly assumes that settler groups were homogenous. Using tax records, this paper shows that the French Huguenots who immigrated to Dutch South...

This paper investigates the extent of the mark-up of the South African manufacturing sector, taking into account a number of characteristics of its component industries. We find significant mark-ups to be present in the South African manufacturing industry. In comparative terms, the mark-up is...

We study how determinacy and learnability of global rational expectations equilibrium may be affected by monetary policy in a simple, two country, New Keynesian framework. The two blocks may be viewed as the U.S. and Europe, or as regions within the euro zone. We seek to understand how monetary...