Financial structure, the extent to which a country’s financial system is either bank-based or market-based has been shown to have an effect on some countries economic growth, while in other countries, it has been shown to be of no economic significance. Many of the studies have focused on developed and emerging economies that have well developed financial systems relative to the financial systems of developing countries.
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Research Briefs
Electricity crisis and the effect of CO2 emissions on infrastructure-growth nexus in Sub Saharan Africa
Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) is a region of over 950 million people but also with greatest proportion of population without access to electricity. The World Development Indicators reveal that electricity-related CO2 emissions (CO2EM), and the ratio of electricity transmission and distribution losses (RETDL) have been rising in SSA over the past decades, implying deterioration in efficiency of the power sector. Given the recent rising focus on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), studies on the impact of electricity consumption and CO2 emissions on economic growth remain vital to inspire energy policy and academic research. Several studies have examined environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) that hypothesizes environmental quality and economic growth nexus. Closely related to this study, plenty of literature is done on the cointegration between electricity, CO2 emissions and growth. Despite the fact, firstly, accounting for electricity quality is still lacking and remains a serious gap. Secondly, measuring both the nature and size of the influence of electricity-related CO2 emissions on the growth contribution of electricity stock (quantity) and quality is another angle that has not been properly interrogated in the literature. Therefore, we investigate the economic growth effects of both electricity stock and quality before and after accounting for electricity-related CO2 emissions.
Credit frictions and co-movement of durable and non-durable goods in a small open economy
Multi-sector sticky price models produce unusual outcomes when the prices of durable goods are flexible. This is because, on the one hand, as empirical evidence suggests, a monetary policy shock results in the positive movement of aggregate consumption in both durable and non-durable goods sectors. On the other, it is because the movement of durable goods is greater than that of non-durable goods, as suggested by Erceg and Levin (2002, 2006). On the other hand, Barsky et al. (2003) show that in a two-sector economy with flexibly priced durable goods and sticky priced non-durable goods, the flexibility of prices of durable goods governs the response of aggregate consumption to a monetary policy tightening. This is because the shadow value of durable goods is approximately constant owing to the typically high stock-to-flow ratio of durable goods. Thus, the responsiveness of the user cost of durable goods does not result in an improvement in total utility for the households.
Latest Publications
"The Power of Nudging: Using Feedback, Competition and Responsibility Assignment to Save Electricity in a Non-Residential Setting”
We use behavioural insights to design nudges leveraging social comparison and assignment of responsibility aimed at reducing electricity consumption in a large provincial government office building with 24 floors.
Determinants of tax revenue performance in the Southern African Development Community (SADC)
This paper investigates the determinants of tax revenue performance in all 15 Southern African Development Community countries during 1990-2010, using panel data. The investigation makes use of two estimation techniques in testing for country specificity.
Random Expected Utility Theory with a Continuum of Prizes
This note generalizes Gul and Pesendorfer’s random expected utility theory, a stochastic reformulation of von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory for lotteries over a finite set of prizes, to the circumstances with a continuum of prizes.
Female household headship and poverty in South Africa: an employment-based analysis
Female household headship is generally associated with higher poverty incidence relative to male headship. Female headship has generally been on the increase in South Africa. And while generally declining over the post-apartheid period, poverty has increased in the recent past.
Emigration and education: the schooling of the left behind in Nigeria
The potential effects of migration on the welfare of the left behind consist in an important part of the debate around migration. In this paper we use data from the World Bank's migration and remittance household survey to examine the impact of family migration on educational attainment.
Latest Journal Publications
Effect of Financial Development on Economic Growth in sub–Saharan Africa: Does Sectoral Growth Matter?
Journal of Policy Modelling (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161893818301170)
This paper examines the overall economic growth effect when the growth in finance and real sector is disproportionate relying on panel data for 29 sub–Saharan African countries over the period 1980–2014.
Impact of macroeconomic announcements on foreign exchange volatility: Evidence from South Africa
South African Journal of Economics (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/saje.12160)
This study focuses on scheduled macroeconomic news announcements and evaluates their impact on the volatility of the South African rand (ZAR) and US dollar (USD) exchange rate using high frequency data.
The Demand for Reproductive Health Care
Journal of African Economies, 2018 (https://academic.oup.com/jae/article-abstract/27/4/405/4835639)
This research formalizes the interactions between the various determinants of a woman's reproductive health behavior during her reproductive years, and, using nonparametric
Race to the top: Does competition in the DSL market matter for fibre penetration?
Telecommunications Policy (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308596117302045)
High speed broadband creates potential productivity gains and has a positive impact on economic growth.
Pareto Optimality and Indeterminancy of General Equilibrium under Knightian Uncertainty
Journal of Mathematical Economics 2018 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304406818300570)
This paper studies general equilibrium theory, for both complete and incomplete markets, under Knightian uncertainty.
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