The relationship between oil and the price level has always garnered attention from policy makers and role players in the market. Periods of high oil price volatility is thought to have negative repercussions for domestic price levels in an oil importing country. Research in the past has shown...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the causal relationship between agricultural prices in South Africa and global oil prices. A nonlinear Granger causality test based on moment conditions, introduced by Nishiyama et al (2011) is employed and we find that there is indeed a causal...

This study investigates the asymmetric and time-varying causality between inflation and inflation uncertainty in South Africa within a conditional Gaussian Markov switching vector autoregressive (MS-VAR) model framework. The MS-VAR model is capable of determining both the sign and direction of...

This paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic effects of uncertainty on the conditional volatility of US-listed Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). To this end we employ three widely accepted US REITs indices and the two uncertainty indices constructed by Baker et al. (2013). Our sample...

The financial crisis has fueled interest in alternatives to traditional asset classes that might be less affected by large market gyrations and, thus, provide for a less volatile development of a portfolio. One attempt at selecting stocks that are less prone to extreme risks, is obeyance of...

Two recent nonlinear causality tests are used to examine the causal linkages across increasingly important international equity and commodity markets. We show that nonlinear causality is more appealing when asymmetric patterns are accounted for. The results are crucial to hedging and portfolio...