Forecasting the future path of the economy is essential for good monetary policy decisions. The recent financial crisis has highlighted the importance of tail events, and that assessing the central projection is not enough. The whole range of outcomes should be forecasted, evaluated and...

The ability of financial frictions to amplify the output response of monetary policy, as in the financial accelerator model of Bernanke et al (1999), is analysed for a wider class of policy rules where the policy interest rate responds to both inflation and the output gap. When policy makers...

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand was the first central bank to publish interest rate projections as a tool for forward guidance of monetary policy. This paper provides new evidence on the information content of interest rate projections for market expectations about future short-term rates before...

Recent research has found evidence of increasing co-movement in CPI inflation rates across industrialised countries. This paper considers whether this increased international co-movement in inflation rates can be attributed to greater global integration of product markets. To examine this...

We investigate the implications of the existence of multi-period fixed-rate loans for the behaviour of a small open economy exposed to finance shocks and housing boom-and-bust cycles. To this end, we propose a simple and analytically tractable method of incorporating multi-period debt into an...

This paper uses multiple criteria decision making, also termed conjoint analysis,to reveal the preferences of central bank policy-makers at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Guided by the Policy Targets Agreement between the Governor of the Reserve Bank and the Minister of Finance, we identify...

This paper uses wavelets to develop a core inflation measure for inflation targeting central banks. The analysis is applied to the case of New Zealand – the country with the longest history of explicit inflation targeting. We compare the performance of our proposed measure against some popular...

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...

Transmission mechanisms are the channels through which monetary policy affects macroeconomic variables, such as GDP and inflation. Differences in transmission mechanisms can generate asymmetric behaviour among currency union partners when they experience shocks. This has the potential to widen...

Most textbook models explain the operation of monetary policy in terms of how the central bank influences the market rate of interest by managing the supply of its liabilities relative to the demand for them. Yet some central banks no longer operate that way and, instead, set an interest rate...