This paper evaluates the Swedish Riksbank's Inflation Reports' and draws comparisons among the Reports issued by the Riksbank, the Bank of England, and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. This report poses and addresses a common set of questions about each of the three central banks' Inflation...

We implement a new survey of firms' macroeconomic beliefs in New Zealand and document a number of novel stylized facts from this survey. Despite nearly twenty-five years under an inflation targeting regime, there is widespread dispersion in firms' beliefs about both past and future macroeconomic...

This paper discusses the recent regional trade agreements that China has concluded rapidly following accession to the WTO in 2002. Agreements are in place with Hong Kong, Macao, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand, and are either in negotiation or under discussion with South Africa, Chile, India,...

The relationship between interest rates and exchange rates is puzzling and poorly understood. But under some standard assumptions, interest rates can be adjusted to smooth real exchange rate movements at the possible price of increased volatility in other variables. In New Zealand, estimates...

This paper describes three prototypical systems of therapeutic reference pricing (RP) for pharmaceuticals -- Germany, the Netherlands, and New Zealand -- and examines their effects on the availability of new drugs, reimbursement levels, manufacturer prices and out-of-pocket surcharges to...

This paper examines the historical origins of "Original Sin" or why countries are unable to issue long term debt domestically or borrow abroad in terms of the domestic currency. We conduct an historical case study for a group of countries that had largely overcome the problem of Original Sin by...

We implement a new survey of firms, focusing on their higher-order macroeconomic expectations. The survey provides a novel set of stylized facts regarding the relationship between first-order and higher-order expectations of economic agents, including how they adjust their beliefs in response to...

Countries that specialize in commodity exports often exhibit a correlation between the relevant commodity price and the value of their currency. We explore a natural but little-studied explanation for this correlation. An increase in the commodity price leads to increases in the future values of...

We estimate the impact of participating in the NZ Marsden Fund on research output trajectories, by comparing the subsequent performance of funded researchers to those who submitted proposals but were not funded. We control for selection bias using the evaluations of the proposals generated by...

This paper examines the impact of government assistance through R&D grants on innovation output for firms in New Zealand. Using a large database that links administrative and tax data with survey data, we are able to control for large number of firm characteristics and thus minimise selection...