This paper uses disaggregated price data to analyse the extent and the speed of retail price convergence between New Zealand and Australia since 1984. The paper addresses several issues concerning the integration of markets in the two countries. It compares the behaviour of the prices of a set...

Recent research shows that trade of goods and financial products is much greater within countries than it is between countries, even allowing for factors such as transports costs. This lack of economic integration is likely to be costly for small nations, as internal trade is much less diverse...

The housing market is both large and complex. This paper develops a simple model that captures the essential features of the supply and demand for housing, and which is used to evaluate the impact of a range of policy interventions. Increases in the stock of housing would reduce rents and house...

This paper summarises recent theoretical and empirical developments in the vast literature that has examined the microeconomic determinants of household saving. It is designed as a primer to provide a basic understanding of some of the developments in the literature in the last decade. The paper...

This paper examines the relationship between the New Zealand government yield curve and the contribution of global and domestic factors influencing it. We apply the Nelson and Siegel method, which has been widely used internationally for fitting a yield curve, to decompose it into three...

This paper explores, in the context of the Atkinson inequality measure, attempts to make interpretations of orders of magnitude transparent. One suggestion is that the analogy of sharing a cake among a very small number of people provides a useful intuitive description for people who want some...

This paper examines the labour supply responses to the Working for Families (WfF) package of welfare reforms, which was fully implemented in 2008. The policy changes were implemented with the aim to encourage benefit recipients to participate in the labour market and to address income adequacy...

The objective of the paper is to explore the saving and consumption responses of a representative household to a range of policy interventions such as changes in taxes and pension settings. To achieve this, it develops a two-period life-cycle model. The representative household maximises...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the extent to which membership of KiwiSaver has been associated with greater accumulations of net wealth. The paper utilises two linked sources of data which cover the period 2002 to 2010: Statistics New Zealand’s Survey of Family, Income and...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the absolute and relative income mobility in disposable income in New Zealand using the full longitudinal data from the Survey of Family, Income and Employment (SoFIE) from 2002 to 2010. To summarise the patterns of mobility, we analyse the income changes...