Working Papers

Following the failure of Saambou bank in February 2002, another seven South African banks failed within a month, including the fifth-largest, and a further five within a year. In total, twenty-two small and mid-sized banks deregistered over two years: half the total number of banks, and nearly 10 per...

We explore the diversity of means by which governments borrow - from commercial banks, sovereign bond issues, official bilateral creditors, and multilateral financial institutions. Although political economy scholars tend to analyze financing instruments in isolation from one another, governments...

I study an expansion of a South African social grant program that provided unconditional cash transfers to adolescents for the first time. Over the period 2009 to 2012, age eligibility for the child support grant was progressively extended from children under 14 to children under 18 years old. I...

In applied studies, the influence of balance measures on the performance of matching estimators is often taken for granted. This paper considers the performance of different balance measures that have been used in the literature when balance is being optimized. We also propose the use of the...

This paper assesses the effect of US monetary policy on South Africa during the period 1990- 2018. We separately analyse and compare the effect of conventional monetary policy, before the Global Financial Crisis, and unconventional monetary policy, after the US monetary policy reached the zero-...

We develop a model that characterizes the joint determination of income distribution and macroeconomic aggregate dynamics. We identify multiple channels through which alternative public policies such as transfers, consumption and income taxes, and public investment will affect the inequality;...

Despite the ending of apartheid, regional wage disparities remain prevalent in South Africa with the former homelands characterised by persistently low wages and incomes. In this paper, we use a new economic geography (NEG) model to estimate the extent to which the persistence in apartheid regional...

We study the compliance with fiscal rules via various national numeric rules. Based on 20 sub-Sahara African countries with 57 fiscal rules in force from 1997 to 2016, our analysis identifies determinants among the rule specific characteristics, as well as their macroeconomic and political...

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...