The New Zealand Treasury forecasts tax revenue for the twice-yearly Economic and Fiscal Updates. The accuracy of these forecasts is important for the government's annual budget decisions as they affect key fiscal aggregates such as the operating balance and debt levels. Good decision-making in...

This paper fits hidden Markov switching models to New Zealand GDP data. A primary objective is to better understand the utility of these methods for modelling growth and volatility regimes present in the New Zealand data and their interaction. Properties of the models are developed together with...

We present new empirical evidence on trend robustness and end-point issues, utilising the macroeconomic data set investigated in McKelvie and Hall (2012). We consider the relative merits of non-robust Hodrick-Prescott (HP) and robust loess (LOcal regrESSion) trend filtering methods, and assess...

A new hidden Markov model for the space-time evolution of daily rainfall is developed which models precipitation within hidden regional weather types by censored power-transformed Gaussian distributions. The latter provide flexible and interpretable multivariate models for the mixed...

A non-linear dynamic model is introduced for multiplicative seasonal time series that follows and extends the X-11 paradigm where the observed time series is a product of trend, seasonal and irregular factors. A selection of standard seasonal and trend component models used in additive dynamic...

This paper fits Markov switching models to quarterly New Zealand aggregate GDP growth rates for the period 1978:1 to 2003:2 in order to analyse changes in mean and volatility over time. The models considered are drawn from a simple class of parsimonious, four state, Markov switching models which...

The variance of New Zealand’s real GDP has declined since the mid-1980s. To investigate why, this paper decomposes the variance of chain-weighted estimates of production-based real GDP growth into sector shares, sector growth rate variances and co-variances. The principal explanation for the...

Evolving volatility is a dominant feature observed in most financial time series and a key parameter used in option pricing and many other financial risk analyses. A number of methods for non-parametric scale estimation are reviewed and assessed with regard to the stylized features of financial...