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This paper assesses the impact of monetary policy on real house price growth in South Africa using a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR), estimated using a large data set comprising of 246 quarterly series over the period 1980:01 to 2006:04. The results based on the impulse response functions indicate that, in general, house price inflation responds negatively to monetary policy shock, but the responses are heterogeneous across the middle-, luxury-and affordable-segments of the housing market. The luxury-, large-middle-and medium-middlesegments are found to respond much more than the small-middle-and the affordable-segments of the housing market. More importantly, we find no evidence of the home price puzzle, observed previously by other studies that analyzed house prices using small-scale models. We put this down to the benefit gained from using a large information set.

observed property prices are assembled from an unobservable 'real' property price linked to macroeconomic conditions and the interest rate environment, and a noisy component given by market sentiment. Between January 1993 and July 2007 all IPD index logarithmic returns were positive. This long series of positive returns created an illusion among investors. It implied that they did not give proper consideration to macroeconomic evidence. That changed fundamentally in 2008. During the subprime crisis investor behavior changed from illusion to disillusion and the market prices occasionally fell well below the level indicated by fundamental economic considerations. IPD property derivatives can, according to the author, be used for risk management purposes. Investors have access to Eurex futures that can be utilized to hedge out property risk and avoid the consequences of price crashes.Giovanni Dell'Ariccia and Deniz Igan, IMF Research have authored chapter 3: "Dealing with real estate booms". Until the global financial crisis, the main policy tenet in dealing with a real estate boom was one of 'benign neglect'. It was considered better to wait for the bust and pick up the pieces than to attempt to prevent the boom. The crisis challenged this view. But preventive policy action is difficult to implement. The authors conclude that policy efforts should focus on booms that are financed through credit and where leveraged institutions are directly involved. Macroprudential tools (such as limits on loan-to-value ratios) are the best candidates to deal with real estate booms as they can be aimed directly at curbing leverage and strengthening the financial sector. Cycles are a common feature of real estate markets. Stylized facts suggest that the longer and higher prices go up, the more they will come down. Housing cycles are closely intertwined with credit and business cycles. Peaks and troughs are not far from each other. There are significant differences across countries. Legal and institutional structures matter. In order to improve policy options, the quality of empirical data should be heightened. Real estate is an important storage of wealth in the economy. Monetary policy is a blunt instrument for the task at hand. It is difficult to use fiscal tools. So, macroprudential regulation in the form of higher capital requirements, dynamic provisioning and limits on loan-to-value and debtto-income ratios are the most promising options.

The goal of this paper is to revisit the influential work of Mauro [1995] focusing on the strength of his results under weak identification. He finds a negative impact of corruption on investment and economic growth that appears to be robust to endogeneity when using two-stage least squares (2SLS). Since the inception of Mauro [1995], much literature has focused on 2SLS methods revealing the dangers of estimation and thus inference under weak identification. We reproduce the original results of Mauro [1995] with a high level of confidence and show that the instrument used in the original work is in fact 'weak' as defined by Staiger and Stock [1997]. Thus we update the analysis using a test statistic robust to weak instruments. Our results suggest that under Mauro's original model there is a high probability that the parameters of interest are locally almost unidentified in multivariate specifications. To address this problem, we also investigate other instruments commonly used in the corruption literature and obtain similar results. Journal of Economic Literature Classification: C31, D73

This paper estimates the intraday value of money implicit in the UK unsecured overnight money market. Using transactions data on overnight loans advanced through the UK large value payments system CHAPS in 2003-2009, we find a positive and economically significant intraday interest rate. While the implicit intraday interest rate is quite small pre-crisis, it increases more than tenfold during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. The key interpretation is that an increase in implicit intraday interest rate reflects the increased opportunity cost of pledging collateral intraday and can be used as an indicator to gauge the stress of the payment system. We obtain qualitatively similar estimates of the intraday interest rate by using quoted intraday bid and offer rates and confirm that our results are not driven by the intraday variation in the bid-ask spread.