Working Papers

We developed a network model to capture the dynamic interactions among foreign exchange returns and realised risk measures among 20 developed and emerging market currencies, including the rand (ZAR). We demonstrate how this framework can be used to assess the sensitivity of a given currency to...

According to recent macroeconomic evidence (Bosch and Koch 2020b; Farrell and Kemp 2020), the global financial crisis is still impacting the South African financial landscape more than 10 years later. In an effort to better understand the effect of the financial crisis, we examine household debt...

I construct and partially characterize the solution of a life-cycle model of fertility choice and human capital accumulation. Because children take time to raise, women face a trade-off between between lifetime earnings and childbearing. The model implies that (i) earnings must drop discontinuously...

South Africa has since the 1990's actively reformed its corporate tax policy to stimulate investment in various assets and industries. While the investment impact of corporate taxation has been evaluated in various studies, no effort has been made to assess the potential inter-asset distortions due...

This paper investigates the responsiveness of firm-level investment to corporate tax changes in South Africa over the period 1999 to 2012. The study exploits rare changes in corporate tax policy to assess the responsiveness of firm-level investment among Johannesburg Stock Exchange listed non-...

South Africa’s fiscal balances have deteriorated significantly over the last decade, while the economy has been recording disappointing economic growth rates even prior to the COVID-19 crisis. In this paper, we estimate a series of equations using the Arellano and Bond (1991) estimator to test how...

This paper examines the relationship between innovation and export performance for African firms. We use Tobit simultaneous equation full information maximum likelihood (FIML) model with selection on a crosssectional dataset from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys for 28 African economies. The...

We consider the effects of climate change on seasonally migrant populations that herd livestock – i.e., transhumant pastoralists – in Africa. Traditionally, transhumant pastoralists benefit from a cooperative relationship with sedentary agriculturalists whereby arable land is used for crop farming...

South Africa successfully reduced smoking prevalence by substantially increasing tobacco excise tax and therefore real cigarette prices between 1993 and 2010. Tobacco market structure changed in 2010 following the entry of local tobacco companies and the introduction of cheaper cigarette brands...

This article investigated income per capita convergence in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) over the period 1980-2017 in a non-linear time-varying coefficients framework. The findings of the study suggested no overall income convergence in the SADC region, but evidence supporting the...