The Macroeconomics Working Group (MWG) is a team of economists comprising academic staff and postgraduate students in the School of Accounting, Economics and Finance. The group was officially established as a SAEF research initiative on 15th April 2015. Prior to this date, the group existed as an informal cluster since July 2014.
The group was started by Professor Harold Ngalawa and Dr Christian Tipoy. Dr Adebayo Kutu, is the convenor of the group’s academic workshops while Mr Ntokozo Nzimande has been coordinating attendance and presentations at international conferences by the group’s researchers. Presently, the Group meets twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in the SAEF Research Centre Board Room.
The Tuesday sessions are reserved for workshops on advanced techniques of solving macroeconomic problems. Among others, Dr Chris Tipoy has facilitated workshops on MATLAB (MATrix LABoratory), a computing system designed to carry out matrix computations. These were followed by workshops on DYNARE, a tool that is used together with MATLAB to solve, simulate and estimate dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Professor Harold Ngalawa facilitated these workshops. Subsequent to the DYNARE workshops were sessions on (calibrated) DSGE models, which were also facilitated by Professor Ngalawa. In the second half of 2016, it is expected that workshops on R and Bayesian DSGE modelling will be organised for the group’s researchers.