Ethnic reunion is the propensity of tourists to travel to regions where their ancestors originate from, while cultural affinity is the propensity of tourists to travel to regions with a shared cultural identity. This paper uses a "world migration matrix", which records the year-1500 origins of...

Integration into the global trading environment is viewed as a key factor underlying the success of the fastest growing economies. Yet many African countries remain isolated and appear to have failed to achieve the level integration of these fast growing economies. This paper presents a...

Despite the debate about whether arts consumers are also sports consumers, many countries have used cultural events to leverage further tourism spending from sports events, the most famous example being the cultural Olympics. This paper reports the findings of research conducted at the 2010...

The role of banks in transmission of monetary policy in an economy has been a subject of theoretical and empirical investigations. This study attempts to empirically investigate the role played by private commercial banks in South Africa in transmitting the impulses of monetary policy shocks to...

We combine new developments in decision theory with a standard consumption-based asset-pricing framework. In our model the efficient market hypothesis is violated if and only if agentsÂ’ beliefs' express ambiguity about the stochastic process driving economic fundamentals. Asset price...

The lack of cooperation and prevalence of free riding in efforts to reduce emissions reflects the public good dilemma synonymous with climate change: whereby individual incentives lead to sub-optimal outcomes. This study examines how cooperative norms can be fostered through democratic...

The international financial crisis that started in 2007 and the subsequent end of the long expansion in South Africa has refocused attention on the business cycle. Prior to the crisis, the economies of both developed and developing countries experienced an extended period of low and stable...

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...

We study the role of exchange rate variability in the firm's choice of whether to o¤er one or two varieties. We show that variability induces the firm to vertically segment markets (offer two varieties). This happens because variability in the exchange rate a¤ects income dispersion and...