The merits of a trans-Tasman currency union have been debated in both New Zealand and Australia. It has been suggested that the New Zealand economy may not behave too differently from at least some of the Australian states, ie they have similar characteristics and they face similar shocks. We...

The interest rate which corresponds to neutral monetary policy settings in New Zealand appears to have trended downwards since at least the stabilisation of inflation in 1992. We present several alternative estimates of a time varying neutral real interest rate (NRR) in state space models, which...

Monetary policy decision-making commonly involves setting interest rates to stimulate the economy and prevent deflationary forces gathering momentum, or to constrain the economy and prevent inflationary forces gathering momentum. In setting interest rates, therefore, one needs to know what level...

Every monetary policy decision by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) is accompanied by a written statement about the state of the economy and the policy outlook, but only every second decision by a published interest rate forecast. We exploit this difference to study the relative influences...

By using administrative data from New Zealand, we assess the relative importance of job-finding, and job-to-job transition rates for wage dynamics. We exploit the regional variation and find that wages are closely linked to job-to-job transitions and less so to the job- finding rate. Further,...

It has been argued that credit-to-GDP gaps (credit gap) are useful early warning indicators for banking crises. In addition, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has also advocated using these gaps - estimated using a one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter with a smoothing parameter of 400,000...