The merits of a trans-Tasman currency union have been debated in both New Zealand and Australia. It has been suggested that the New Zealand economy may not behave too differently from at least some of the Australian states, ie they have similar characteristics and they face similar shocks. We...

The interest rate which corresponds to neutral monetary policy settings in New Zealand appears to have trended downwards since at least the stabilisation of inflation in 1992. We present several alternative estimates of a time varying neutral real interest rate (NRR) in state space models, which...

It has been suggested that the New Zealand economy may have similar characteristics and face similar shocks to some Australian states, so lowering the costs of a trans-Tasman currency union. We test this, under the assumption that differences in Taylor rule-implied interest rate paths for...

Monetary policy decision-making commonly involves setting interest rates to stimulate the economy and prevent deflationary forces gathering momentum, or to constrain the economy and prevent inflationary forces gathering momentum. In setting interest rates, therefore, one needs to know what level...

We estimate a Factor Augmented Vector autoregression (FAVAR) to identify idiosyncratic exchange rate shocks and examine the effects of these shocks on different sectors of the economy. We find that an unexpected shock to the exchange rate has significant effects on the tradable sector of the...

We test for evidence of asymmetric behaviour in the monetary policy reaction functions of the central banks of Australia and New Zealand. For the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, we found little evidence of asymmetric behaviour, whereas the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) appears to react more...

People's expectations of future house prices appear to be an important influence on house prices and the volume of house sales (Wheaton 1990; Berkovec and Goodman 1996). For example, Case and Shiller (2006) argue that expectations played a role in producing California's house price boom in the late...

Real Business Cycle (RBC) and Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) methods have become essential components of the macroeconomist’s toolkit. This literature review stresses recently developed techniques for computation and inference, providing a supplement to the Romer (2006)...