Includes bibliographical references / This thesis addresses exchange rate behaviour in a de-facto partially dollarized economy. Over the past two decades the Tanzanian Shilling has been increasingly displaced by the United States dollar. This change has been prompted by instability of the local currency, and by the practices of foreign firms, which have used a dual pricing system at rates disadvantageous to the local currency. The implications of Tanzania's dollarization are traced through three related investigations: whether theTanzania Shilling to United States Dollar exchange rate overshoots, whether it has impacted the monetary transmission mechanism, and whether dollarization has substantively affected the pattern of Tanzania's foreign trade. The first study uses the Structural Vector Autoregression to test if the overshooting hypothesis holds for the TZS-USD exchange rate.The results suggest that foreign currency deposits are encouraged by the volatility of the exchange rate.In addition it is noted that the exchange rate demonstrates delayed overshooting, while a contractionary monetary policy leads to appreciation in the exchange rate for at least a year before returning to equilibrium. The determinants of the exchange rate in Tanzania are trade openness, real interest differentials, labour productivity and government expenditure. The second study uses a Bayesian Vector Autoregression to investigate the monetary transmission mechanism in the presence of dollarization. The results indicate that positive shocks on the interest rate contract money supply, which leads to lower output growth and inflation, while the exchange rate appreciates. The degree of dollarization also has a negative impact on the monetary supply of the local currency, as the central bank seeks to maintain a relatively constant rate of total money supply. This has the effect of lowering the inflation and interest rates, and is also associated with further depreciation of the exchange rate. The positive shock on the exchange rate (depreciation) is associated with an increase in dollarization.The aggregate demand shock fuels inflation and, in Tanzania's case, it has increased money supply, due to the persistent demand for real monetary balances. The third study uses a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium to describe the conduct of monetary policy in a small, open, and partially dollarized Tanzanian economy. The structure of the model incorporates the expectations of agents and the dynamic relationships are explained in terms of structural representations that characterize the behaviour of the firm, household and central bank. The parameters in the model are estimated with Bayesian techniques, after it has been applied to Tanzanian data. The effects of individual shocks, including those that may be used to describe the conduct of monetary policy, are then considered. These simulations suggest that despite the existence of partial dollarization in the Tanzanian economy, monetary policy has important, short-term, real effects. The fourth study uses an Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to investigate the short and long run exchange rate sensitivity of foreign trade. Principal components analysis is also used to reduce the dimension of the dataset. It finds evidence that the depreciation of the Shilling typically has an immediate positive impact on the trade balance, and exchange rate depreciation increases the trade balance in both the short and long run. However, exports show signs that support the J-curve hypothesis, though the associated parameters are not significant. Imports are not reduced by a rise in the Shilling, as traditional theory would suggest. This is ascribed to the country's de-facto partial dollarization. Since over 40 per cent of money supply arecurrently held in dollar denominated accounts, trade is largely immune to domestic currency fluctuations. This study also notesthat the use of foreign currency has tended to rise during periods of substantial economic growth. Although no causality is argued, this does suggest that the parallel use of foreign and domestic currencies is not detrimental to Tanzania's economic growth.

The 2007/08 global financial crisis, including pre- and post-crisis reform, led economies to reexamine the concept of capital controls. Theoretical and empirical literature has been divided regarding their effectiveness. This research paper assesses the impact of capital controls on exchange rate stability in South Africa (particularly exchange restrictions used to insulate economies from excessive currency volatility) using time-series analysis and employs event study methodology (Kothari & Warner, 2006; MacKinlay, 1997) to measure the impact of the capital control actions. More specifically, this research paper evaluates the impact of capital controls on (a) exchange rate returns, (b) volatility and (c) liquidity in South Africa for the period commencing 1 January 1999 to 31 December 2014 including the period during the 2007/08 financial crisis. The research paper applies methodology from empirical research on capital controls and currency stability (Pandey, Pasricha, Patnaik, & Shah, 2015), volatility using standard deviation and the GARCH (1,1) model (Abdalla, 2012; Bollerslev, 1986; Farrell, 2001) and liquidity (Karnaukh, Ranaldo, & Söderlind, 2015). In addition, it attempts to determine the effect on exchange rate movements directly attributable to capital controls i.e., the local factors, by removing the dollar risk factor that constitute a significant portion of exchange rate time series as noted by Verdelhan (2015), which serves as the base model for the event study. The research paper finds that overall the key capital controls selected do not have a significant impact on the ZAR/USD exchange rate with limited evidence of an effect on returns, volatility and liquidity.

Bibliography: pages 53-56. / The main objective of this paper is to discuss exchange rate policies in Botswana from 1976 to 1994. It is also an attempt to find out how Botswana has responded to exogenous shocks and whether such responses could be used in the future when shocks recur. The paper contends that Botswana's record in responding to shocks has been impressive. This is not to say that previous policy actions in response to shocks would be adequate when shocks occur again. Experience shows that it is difficult to respond to exogenous shocks when they take time to subside.

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There has been considerable interest among market participants, market regulators and academics in the pricing of stock index futures contracts. Academic research in this area has been motivated by several considerations. First, the utility of these contracts for risk allocation and price discovery depends on the efficiency with which they are priced relative to the underlying index. Second, it has been widely believed that they have adverse impact on price dynamics in the stock market. Third, and most important, stock index futures offer the possibility of directly studying the economics of arbitrage in the context of market microstructure. This dissertation extends the theoretical framework on stock index futures pricing in two directions. First, within the static cost of carry framework, it generalises the forward pricing formula by allowing for cash market settlement procedures. Second, it shows that in the presence of arbitrage related transaction costs, the time series of stock index futures "mispricing" can be modelled as a threshold autoregressive (TAR) process, a piecewise linear autoregressive process in which the process parameters are path dependent. The TAR model is potentially attractive for many financial applications and this dissertation appears to be the first use of the TAR model in finance. This dissertation also provides substantial and significant new empirical evidence relevant to the theoretical issues involved. Inter-alia, it analyses several important aspects not adequately examined in past research, and it utilises the unique microstructural features of the London stock market to explore several major theoretical issues. The empirical analysis is based mainly on about four years of "time and sales" transactions data from the London International Financial Futures Exchange together with synchronous hourly cash index data.

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Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2015. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Facilities are available to individual investors to enable them to invest directly in a multitude of investments without making use of investment brokers or financial advisors. Although this facility offers the benefit of reduced administration and management fees, it also puts the investor in a position where he is responsible for making his own investment decisions. Since Markowitz’s publication fifty years ago, it has been known that diversification is necessary in order to reduce the investor’s exposure to any unsystematic investment risk while still obtaining an acceptable return. Studies have shown that human behaviour has an impact on investment decisions and that human nature skews the individual’s perception of diversification and risk and the reality thereof. For this reason, the individual investor is better off making use of quantitative methods in order to ensure a properly diversified portfolio. Exchange traded products are passive, index tracking investments that trade on stock exchanges and pose benefits to individual investors owing to their low administrative costs and inherent levels of diversification. Individual investors are able to purchase exchange traded products such as exchange traded funds (ETFs), exchange traded notes (ETNs) and index tracking unit trusts through various means, including brokerage firms and online trading platforms. These platforms offer little advice to the individual investor on how to select the most suitable investment products and how each product will affect the risk profile of an investor’s portfolio. The purpose of this research assignment was to develop a portfolio optimisation tool that would help the investor obtain the optimal return for his desired level of risk, thereby ensuring efficient diversification. An optimisation model was developed by using performance data from 2009 to 2013 and the resultant optimised portfolio’s performance was evaluated for 2014. It was found that optimisation rendered acceptable results, provided that the covariances between the various ETFs showed equivalence year on year. This requirement limited the number of ETFs that could be included in the model. Improvements to the model were recommended, based on the results of similar research in the field of portfolio optimisation. Further research is proposed that would utilise other optimisation methods, other sources of data and comparisons that are more detailed.

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