The paper develops an overlapping generations model incorporating a realistic depiction of the credit constraints facing home buyers to explain why home ownerships rates have declined in New Zealand since 1990 despite a significant relaxation of credit constraints. The model focuses attention on...

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...

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...

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...

When base velocity is a stable function of the Federal funds rate (FFR), the money base-nominal GDP targeting rule (McCallum rule) can be re-parameterised and presented in terms of FFR as the policy instrument. Comparison of this McCallum modified policy rule with the popular Taylor rule...

This paper looks at reduced form descriptions of changes in the USD/NZD exchange rate, with emphasis on the interest rate-exchange rate relationship. In the estimated reduced form equations, high domestic short term interest rates relative to foreign interest rates are associated with continued...

The 2002 Policy Targets Agreement (PTA) between the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the government asks the Reserve Bank to target inflation "over the medium term" rather than over an annual target. This medium term objective shifts inflation targeting towards a "halfway-house" between inflation...

This paper examines stabilisation bias - the difference between the inferior macroeconomic outcomes attained with discretionary monetary policy relative to the ideal that could be attained with commitment policy. The paper works within the linear-quadratic framework and represents the monetary...

Many critics of the Taylor rule claim that it is inferior to inflation forecast based (IFB) rules because it is not forward-looking, is not aggressive enough, and because of uncertainty surrounding the output gap. Nevertheless, the Taylor rule serves a constructive purpose because it abstracts...