Happy in the service of the Company: the purchasing power of VOC salaries at the Cape in the 18th century

This paper contributes to the debate on the level and trajectory of welfare at the Cape of Good Hope during the 18th century. Recent scholarship (for example, Allen 2005) has calculated and compared the levels and evolution of real wages in various European and Asian economies since the early modern period. To this lit-erature we add evidence for unskilled and skilled workers of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope during the 18th century, following De Zwart (2009; 2011), who recently presented evidence for unskilled workers in the Cape for the latter half of the 17th century and the 18th century. We calculate job-specific real wages in a three-step argument; from the narrowest international comparison of wage rates in terms of silver content to one based on a basket of widely consumed goods. The paper’s contributions lie in the breadth of the com-parisons, the inclusion of skilled workers in the comparison and the adaptation of the consumption basket to local conditions and relative prices at the Cape. The results support the hypothesis that at the start of the 18th century, the Cape Col-ony was relatively poor on an international comparison, but as the century un-folded, gained considerably on even the richest contemporary societies.Real wages, Dutch East India Company (VOC), Cape Colony, Compari-sons of living standards, Economic history of South Africa, Economic history of the Cape Colony

A new and direct test of the ‘gender bias’ in multiple-choice questions

Local and international research has identified a bias in favour of male students with MCQs. If correctly identified, this bias holds implications for reasonable assessment strategies in economics courses. A standard method used in the literature is to relate student performance to various features of the learning environment (such as the type of question) and to student-specific characteristics (such as past performance and lecture attendance). A more direct approach is possible: we set comparable questions (in three categories – graphs, quantitative and theory) in the written and MCQ sections of three tests in the introductory microeconomics course at the University of Stellenbosch. This allows a direct comparison between the performance of male and female students (overall and per question category), without the need to model overall student performance. The number of students in this course, almost 2000, offers a suitably large sample for studying this question. Our evidence does not confirm the strong claims about gender bias in the literature; indeed we find the opposite: a strong positive female gender effect, but for written questions only. We also find no evidence of higher risk-aversion by female students towards MCQ questions with negative marking.Gender bias, Economics education

Two optimistic traditions in the dismal science: rationalism and the "invisible hand"

This paper explores two traditions of optimism in economics. In one of these traditions optimism is based on the comprehension of a spontaneous (and often progressive) order in a decentralised (or market) economy – what I will call the optimism of the “invisible hand”. Against the optimism of the invisible hand stands another optimistic tradition in economics, whereby we might take courage from our ability to do right by society through instructing governments with the keen edge of our most enlightened plans. This tradition is called “constructivist rationalism” here. The paper explores the logic of each tradition and their historical development and applies both to a recent example of policy making in South Africa: government’s fundamental regulatory overhaul of the pharmaceutical industry based on the Medicines Act of 1997, specifically, the decision to implement price controls on medicines.Spontaneous order, Modernism, Planning, Optimism, Information, Uncertainty, Price controls, Institutions, Constitutions, Law and Economics

Business Cycles in Emerging market Economies: A New View of the Stylised Facts

This paper builds on an earlier work in business cycle theory - explicitly in the classical cycle tradition of Burns and Mitchell (1946) and the more recent work by Harding and Pagan (e.g.: 2002a; 2005b; 2005a) - to identify and analyse business cycles in emerging market economies. The goal is to revisit the work of for example Agénor, McDermott and Prasad (2000), whom have established a set of stylised facts for business cycle fluctuations in developing countries. Agénor, et. al. (2000) established these stylised facts using the presently standard method of analysing the features of serially correlated deviations from trends (idenified with statistical techniques such as the Hodrick-Prescott filter) in certain macroeconomic time series, including real GDP, the price level, and components of final demand. The alternative method, implemented in this paper, uses an algorithm of Bry and Boschan (1971), and the recent work of Harding and Pagan to identify the various stylised facts regarding the duration, steepness, amplitude and concordance of these fluctuations in emerging market economies.business cycles, turning points, emerging market economies, quantitative analysis of business cycles, time series econometrics, regression with binary variables

Implications of the financial crisis for models in monetary policy

Monetary authorities have been implicated in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. John Muellbauer, for example, has blamed what he thought was initially inadequate policy responses by central banks to the crisis on their models, which are, in his words, “overdue for the scrap heap”. This paper investigates the role of monetary policy models in the crisis and finds that (i) it is likely that monetary policy contributed to the financial crisis and (ii) that an inappropriately narrow suite of models made this mistake easier. The core models currently used at prominent central banks were not designed to discover emergent financial fragility. In that respect John Muellbauer is right. But the implications drawn here are less dramatic than his: while the representative agent approach to microfoundations now seems indefensible, other aspects of modern macroeconomics are not similarly suspect. The case made here is rather for expanding the suite of models used in the regular deliberations of monetary authorities, with new models that give explicit roles to the financial sector, to money and to the process of exchange. Recommending a suite of models for policy making entails no methodological innovation. That is what central banks do; though, of course, how they do it is open to improvement. The methodological innovation is the inclusion of a model that would be sensitive to financial fragility, a sensitivity that was absent in the run-up to the current financial crisis.Monetary policy, financial crisis, methodology of policy models

The miracle of the Septuagint and the promise of data mining in economics

This paper argues that the sometimes-conflicting results of a modern revisionist literature on data mining in econometrics reflect different approaches to solving the central problem of model uncertainty in a science of non-experimental data. The literature has entered an exciting phase with theoretical development, methodological reflection, considerable technological strides on the computing front and interesting empirical applications providing momentum for this branch of econometrics. The organising principle for this discussion of data mining is a philosophical spectrum that sorts the various econometric traditions according to their epistemological assumptions (about the underlying data-generating-process DGP) starting with nihilism at one end and reaching claims of encompassing the DGP at the other end; call it the DGP-spectrum. In the course of exploring this spectrum the reader will encounter various Bayesian, specific-to-general (S-G) as well general-to-specific (G-S) methods. To set the stage for this exploration the paper starts with a description of data mining, its potential risks and a short section on potential institutional safeguards to these problems.Data mining, model selection, automated model selection, general to specific modelling, extreme bounds analysis, Bayesian model selection

Collapse. The story of the international financial crisis, its causes and policy consequences

This paper is the story of success and failure in the financial markets, the markets for goods and services and in politics. It is a difficult story to tell because the crisis had many causes, but the focus here is on three main factors. First, the incentives that contributed to a credit-fuelled bubble, especially in property markets. Monetary and regulatory policies feature prominently in this part of the story. Second, because the housing bubble alone cannot explain the magnitude of the subsequent events, gearing in the financial sector, which affected asset markets unrelated to sub-prime mortgages will be examined. These developments are explained by reference to private financial sector decisions, including the role of the shadow-banking sector, and their regulatory backdrop. Finally, an answer will be sought to the question of how highly geared banks first became fragile and then failed with such dire consequences for the economy that massive policy intervention had become essential. The consequences of these large policy interventions and the international tensions caused by them are also explored.Financial crisis, Banks, Financial regulation, Monetary policy, Fiscal policy, Currency wars

On the (non-)equivalence of capital adequacy and monetary policy: A response to Cechetti and Kohler

The instrument problem in monetary policy is back on the agenda. Until recently interest rate policy was widely thought to be sufficient for the attainment of appropriate monetary policy goals. No longer. In the wake of the international financial crisis there is much pressure on monetary authorities to incorporate the goal of financial stability more explicitly in policy. This requires an expansion of the instruments typically used by central banks. Cechetti and Kohler (2010) recently considered this new version of the instrument problem in monetary policy by analysing the distinct role and potential for co-ordinating (i) interest rates and (ii) capital adequacy requirements. In this paper we connect this modern debate with an earlier version of the instrument problem, famously discussed by Poole (1970). Then, as now (we claim), the main message of the analysis is the non-equivalence of these instruments and the structural features of the economy on the basis of which one would prefer a particular combination of these instruments. These results are demonstrated with a set of simulations. We also offer a theoretical criticism of the modelling approach used by Cechetti and Kohler (2010).Monetary policy, Instrument problem, Interest rates, Alternative monetary policy instruments, Balance sheet operations, Policy co-ordination

Bias correction in a dynamic panel data model of economic growth: The African dummy re-examined

The discrepancy between the observed and expected growth rates of African economies in cross-country or panel growth regressions is often summarised in a significant African dummy. However, the existence of this dummy may be an artifact of the panel data techniques used. The standard LSDV (least squares dummy variable) method produces a large bias in the estimate of the coefficient on the lagged dependent variable, which could generate the observed African dummy. The lagged dependent variable in a growth model is used to calculate the cross-country rate of convergence. If, however, the convergence rate is overestimated, then the Africa dummy would result due to the clustering of African economies at the lower end of the world cross-country income distribution. Correcting for the bias - using Kiviet’s (1995) algorithm - allows a fresh look at the apparent systematic underperformance of African countries relative to their growth predictions. Little evidence remains of such underperformance by African economies once the relevant bias in the dynamic panel has been accounted for.growth regressions, dynamic panels, African dummy

Talking to the inattentive public: How the media translates the Reserve Bank’s communications

Central bank communication is widely recognised as crucial to the implementation of monetary policy. This communication should enhance a central bank’s management of the inflation expectations of the financial markets as well as the general public — the latter being a part of the central bank’s audience that has received relatively little research attention. In this paper, the role of the media in transmitting the SARB’s communication to the general public is explored, with the aim of improving our understanding of its impact on the expectations channel of the monetary policy transmission mechanism. A deliberate evaluation of this channel could aid the design of future strategies to communicate with the general public.South Africa, central bank communication, consistency, monetary policy transmission mechanism, transparent monetary policy.