Working Papers

This paper studies the transmission of US monetary shocks across the globe by employing a high-frequency identification of policy shocks and large VAR techniques, in conjunction with a large macro- financial dataset of global and national indicators covering both advanced and emerging economies...

We study the relationship between outreach and the financial performance of 479 microfinance institutions (MFIs) in 37 countries of sub-Saharan African (SSA), covering the period 1998 to 2012. This study builds on earlier literature on the relationship between outreach and the financial performance...

Pervasive threats of climate change and land degradation have compounded the low farm productivity problem inherent in sub-Saharan Africa. Though sustainable agricultural intensification practices have been shown to improve resilience of farm production in the face of these emerging threats, they...

We investigate the optimal design and e ectiveness of monetary and macroprudential policies in promoting macroeconomic (price) and financial stability for the South African economy. We develop a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring a housing market, a banking sector...

Background Forty-nine million people or 83 per cent of the entire population of 59 million rely on the public healthcare system in South Africa. Coupled with a shortage of medical professionals, high migration, inequality and unemployment; healthcare provision is under extreme pressure. Due to...

This study proposes an equivalence scale model for required energy consumption at the household level. The proposed approach equivalises actual energy expenditure across households in two steps: estimating an equivalence scale and dividing actual expenditure by the estimated scale for each...

Since Marshall's (1890) work on industrial districts in 19^{th} century England, agglomeration economies are credited for providing the needed catalytic role to economic growth and development. It does this by allowing critical masses, where knowledge spillovers among firms; labour market pooling;...

We study the effect of trade openness on fertility rates in fifty African countries during the1962 - 2010 period. By disaggregating the trade openness data in novel ways, and allowing for country and time fixed effects, our results indicate that trade openness and imports of manufactured goods are...

We fill the gap by examining how gender attitudes and performance under competitive situations in the lab, reflects microenterprise outcomes in the renewable energy sector of Rwanda. — a country with progressive gender policies despite its traditional patriarchal set-up. We use the standard...

This paper develops a new index of financial market stress for South Africa (SAFSI) over the period 1995-2017, that has the advantage of capturing the interconnectedness of financial markets as well as enabling each indicator to be assessed in terms of its systemic importance. The index represents...