This paper analyses local labour and hosuing market adjustment in New Zealand from 1989 to 2006. We use a VAR approach to examine the adjustment of employment, employment rate, participation rate, wages, and house prices in response to employment shocks. Migration is a major adjustment response...

This paper uses data from the 1996, 2001 and 2006 New Zealand Census to examine how the supply of immigrants in particular skill-groups affects the employment and wages of the New Zealand-born and of earlier migrants. We first estimate simple CES production functions that allow for...

This paper focuses on migration between Australia and New Zealand, which has exhibited a strong, but cyclical, net movement towards Australia since the late 1960s. A long-term historical perspective is taken. Trans-Tasman migration is also compared with inter-island migration within New Zealand....

New Zealand's large and volatile external migration flows generate significant year-to-year fluctuations in the demand for residential housing. This paper uses population data from the 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006 New Zealand Censuses, house sales price data from Quotable Value New Zealand...

Since the inequality of earnings in East Germany has approached West German levels in the late 1990s, the standard Roy model predicts that a positive selection bias of East-West migrants should disappear. Using a switching regression model and data from the IAB-employment sample, we find however...

This paper investigates the causal effect of geographic labour mobility on income. The returns to German East-West migration and commuting are estimated exploiting the structure of centrally planned economies and a "natural experiment" of German reunification for identification. I find that...

This paper uses data from the New Zealand Census to examine how the supply of recent migrants in particular skill groups affects the geographic mobility of the New Zealand-born and earlier migrants. We identify the impact of recent migration on mobility using the 'areaanalysis' approach, which...

Twenty-three percent of New Zealand's population is foreign-born and forty percent of migrants have arrived in the past ten years. Newly arriving migrants tend to settle in spatially concentrated areas and this is especially true in New Zealand. This paper uses census data to examine the...

Many aggregate measures of wellbeing and sustainability exist to guide policy-makers. However, the power of these aggregate measures to predict objective wellbeing outcomes has received little comparative testing. We compile and compare a range of aggregate wellbeing measures including: material...

This paper documents a comprehensive database for the populations of 60 New Zealand towns and cities (henceforth “towns”). Populations are provided for every tenth year from 1926 through to 2006. New Zealand towns have experienced very different growth rates over this period. Economic...