Without information on the market values of the main components of household wealth, it is difficult to understand the behaviour of aggregate consumer spending and of the broad money holdings of households. This paper constructs the first coherent set of aggregate personal sector wealth...

There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption. Much of the empirical literature is marred by poor controls for the common drivers both of house prices and consumption, including income, income growth expectations, interest rates, credit supply...

In common with many emerging market countries, South Africa`s government does not publish balance sheet wealth estimates on a market value basis, as produced in the U.S., U.K., Japan, and elsewhere. Yet without information on the market values of liquid and illiquid personal sector wealth, it is...

Evolving openness to trade is hard to measure, despite its relevance to models of growth, inflation and exchange rates. Our innovative technique measures trade openness encompassing both observable trade policy (tariffs and surcharges) and unobservable trade policy (quotas and other non-tariff...

The Welsh economy has undergone rapid structural change in recent years. This paper uses data from the New Earnings Survey to examine how earnings in Wales changed relative to those of Great Britain between 1975 and 1994. There are five main findings. First, earnings of workers in Wales have...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, but this fact is ignored in most work on consumer price inflation. Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates, or CPIX) for South Africa are modeled separately...

The consumption behaviour of UK, US and Japanese households is examined and compared using a modern Ando-Modigliani style consumption function.  The models incorporate income growth expectations, income uncertainty, housing collateral and other credit effects.  These models therefore capture...

This paper presents new models for aggregate UK data on mortgage possessions (foreclosures) and mortgage arrears (payment delinquencies).  The innovations include the treatment of difficuly to observe variations in loan quality and shifts in forbearance policy by lenders, by common latent...

Forecasts are presented for the 12-month ahead US rate of inflation measured by the chain weighted personal consumer expenditure deflator, PC, and its three main components: non-durable goods, durable goods and services.  Monthly models are estimated for 1974 to 1999, and pseudo out-of-sample...