Does homeownership affect individual social capital and thereby influence local outcomes? Following DiPasquale and Glaeser, a body of literature suggests that homeownership is positively related to social capital formation. Homeowners have an incentive to engage in the local community in order...

This non-technical ‘think-piece' examines aspects of infrastructure project evaluation, concentrating on circumstances that may render a standard cost benefit analysis (CBA) inappropriate. It is designed to make infrastructure investors and planners think deeply about their assumptions and to...

In this paper, we construct a dataset of annual expected forest profits in New Zealand from 1990-2008 at a fine spatial resolution. We do not include land values in any of our profit calculations. We estimate four measures of expected forest profits based around net present value (NPV), land...

This paper examines the dynamics of employment adjustment in New Zealand, focusing on the response of firms to the 2008/09 Global Financial Crisis. We use data from Statistics New Zealand's prototype Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) to examine firms' employment responses to output shocks...

Under the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme, foresters can obtain carbon units as their forests sequester carbon. If they sell these units as they are earned, the units must be repurchased when the forest is harvested, exposing foresters to price risk. This paper examines the way forward...

Survey evidence has revealed large differences in beliefs held by different cultures and ethnicities which may affect their economic prosperity. We study how the beliefs of New Zealand's indigenous Māori about the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for...

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 analyses the relationship between firms' multi-factor productivity and the effective employment density of the areas where they operate. Quantifying these agglomeration elasticities is of central importance in the evaluation of the wider economic benefits of transport investments. We...

No country has previously attempted to include either agriculture or forestry in an emissions trading system. The New Zealand government is planning to include both. This paper describes how they plan to do it, what some of the critical issues have been and some of the outstanding challenges. If...

To what extent do New Zealand firms choose to locate close to each other, and why? This paper summarises patterns of geographic concentration of firms in New Zealand between 1987 and 2003. We present a range of summary measures of own-industry concentration, and examine between-industry...