Many countries try to protect their poor during structural adjustment. Targeting is needed to prevent benefits leaking to the non-poor but screening for direct transfers may be too costly for developing countries. One solution is indirect targeting, based on the characteristics of the poor....

Immigrants are typically found to have less wealth and hold it in different forms than the native born. These differences may affect both the economic assimilation of immigrants and overall portfolio allocation when immigrants are a large share of the population, as in New Zealand. In this...

Bairam (1996, 1997) reports rankings of seven New Zealand university economics departments in terms of their publications in certain refereed journals for the 1988-95 period. These rankings may not be reliable because a correction for the different page sizes of various journals was applied to...

The extent to which people are saving for retirement is a key element in formulating public policy toward saving and retirement incomes. This paper adopts a life cycle model of wealth accumulation to estimate the saving rates that people would need in order to have an adequate income in...

This paper presents a cohort analysis of household income, consumption and saving in New Zealand. It is based on an analysis of unit record data from March years 1984 to 1998 taken from the Household Economic Survey (HES). These data are a series of cross-sectional surveys rather than a true...

Emigration to New Zealand and consequent remittance inflows are dominant features of many Pacific Island countries. Evaluating the effect of these people and money flows on incomes and poverty in the Pacific is potentially complicated by the non-random selection of emigrants. This paper uses the...

Sheepskin effects are the wage returns specific to educational credentials rather than to accumulated years of education. They can occur because credentials may signal workers' productivity. Signalling high productivity may be more valuable for members of ethnic minority groups if employers...

This note reports propensity score matching estimates of the public sector pay premium in New Zealand for each year from 2003 until 2007. Comparing with observably similar private sector workers shows that public sector workers have received a pay premium that has grown in each year, from almost...

Maori and Pacific Island workers are more likely than other workers to transit from employment to unemployment whereas exit rates from unemployment are relatively less dispersed across ethnic groups. Hence, lack of job security appears to raise the unemployment rate for Maori and Pacific...

There is a widely reported positive correlation between education and the amount of volunteer time given. Many researchers assume this is a causal relationship, so increased volunteer work has been added to the list of 'external benefits' of education. These 'external benefits' make public...