In December 2009 the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, in conjunction with Northwestern University’s Centre for International Economics and Development (CIED), hosted a monetary policy conference to mark the 20th anniversary of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act. Passed in December 1989, the Act...

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...

A compelling, but highly tractable, axiomatic foundation for intertemporal decision making is established and discussed. This axiomatic foundation relies on methods employed in cooperative bargaining theory. Four simple axioms imply that the intertemporal objective function is a weighted...

Consider an n-person bargaining problem where players bargain over the division of a cake whose size is stochastic. In such a game, the players are not only bargaining over the division of a cake, but they are also sharing risk. This paper presents the Nash bargaining solution to this problem,...

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...

Three of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics - the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolio - appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional wisdom and...

We study optimal consumption and portfolio choice in a framework where investors save for early retirement and assume that agents can adjust their labor supply only through an irreversible choice of their retirement time. We obtain closed form solutions and analyze the joint behavior of...

This paper derives an intertemporal optimality condition for economies with private information, focusing on a class of recursive preferences. By comparing it to the situation where agents can freely save in a risk-free asset market, we derive the optimal savings distortions necessary for...

We propose a new model of exchange rates, based on the hypothesis that the possibility of rare but extreme disasters is an important determinant of risk premia in asset markets. The probability of world disasters as well as each country's exposure to these events is time-varying. This creates...

The sub-prime crisis has shown a harsh spotlight on the practices of securities underwriters, which provided too many complex securities that proved to ultimately have little value. This uproar calls attention to the fact that the literature on intermediaries has carefully analyzed their...