The stylized view of the Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1795) is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress in the first 143 years of Dutch rule. New evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records show that previous estimates about wealth at the Cape are inaccurate. In contrast to...

This paper uses seven waves of data from the US Health and Retirement Study to investigate the impact of expectations regarding the timing of retirement on pre-retirement wealth accumulation. More specifically, we analyze the effect of the individual's subjective belief that he will work full...

The conventional view is that a monetary policy shock has both supply-side and demand-side effects, at least in the short run. Barth and Ramey (2001) show that the supply-side effect of a monetary policy shock may be greater than the demand-side effect. We argue that it is crucial for monetary...

Emerging market economies (EMEs) have persistently experienced different waves of commodity terms of trade disturbances, generating macroeconomic instabilities. The adoption of in‡flation targeting (IT) by many emerging market economies has raised the questions about its relative suitability...

South African authorities are attempting to limit inflows of illegal immigrants. Evidence for the United States presented in Dixon et al (2011) suggests that a policy-induced reduction in labour supply from illegal immigrants generates a welfare loss for legal residents. I use a similar labour...

The study investigates the criteria used by multinational companies to identify the locations of their African regional headquarters (RHQs) and the importance that multinational companies assign to the respective regional offices. We find that multinationals do assign value to their RHQs but are...

We examine the high-frequency response of the rand-dollar nominal rate within ten-minute intervals around five minutes before, five minutes after) official inflation announcements, and show that the rand appreciates (respectively, depreciates) on impact when inflation is higher (respectively,...

The Dutch disease argument suggests that in commodity exporting countries "overvaluation" of the currency due to increases in commodity prices harms manufacturing even though the economy as a whole benefits, led by the booming natural resources sector. The relationship between the real exchange...

The South African labour market is characterised by sharp segmentation, high unemployment and apparently limited informal sector employment. Recent work has focussed on the importance of the quality of education while others have argued that the rigidity of the labour market constrains...

Using several variants of a Marshallian Macroeconomic Model (MMM), see Zellner and Israilevich (2005) and Ngoie and Zellner (2012), this paper investigates how various tax rate reductions may help stimulate the U.S. economy while not adversely affecting aggregate U.S. debt. Variants of our MMM...