Housing affordability has been a topic of much interest in New Zealand over recent years with the median house price increasing by over 50% between 2004 and 2008. The aim of this paper is to inform debate by drawing out evidence from two surveys: the Household Economic Survey (HES); and the...

Conditional on the Shin (Economic Journal, 103, 1993) model, the incidence of insider trading is estimated in two different British betting markets: those for horse-racing and the 1997 general election. Formal testing confirms that insider trading is significantly lower in handicap than...

Bookmakers practise a type of product bundling. To bet a horse for a place a punter has to bet an equal amount for a win. The returns to the place component of the bet are determined by a rule of thumb. This paper examines whether the product bundling negates a betting strategy that endeavours...

NZIER has always had a strong interest in understanding the way in which the New Zealand economy interacts with the rest of the world. We have a long history of producing research into trade liberalisation and globalisation. As the global economy becomes ever more complex, we are now turning our...

This paper examines the implications for national savings of three retirement income policy options, designed to improve the fiscal sustainability of New Zealand Superannuation (NZS). A simple model is developed that employs population and longevity projections allowing estimation of the...

There are many costs associated with international trade. These costs act as barriers to trade and affect the level of trade. This paper first provides a brief discussion of the state-of- the-art methods used to measure trade costs and to quantify their impact on trade. It then empirically...

This paper explores the KiwiSaver information contained in two sources: the administrative data from the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) and the Survey of Family, Income and Employment (SoFIE). In particular, the paper explores the membership and contribution information, explaining significant...

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...

It is well known that the parametric version of Cumulative Prospect theory (CPT) proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and Tversky and Kahneman (1992) (KT) can explain gambling at actuarially unfair odds on long shots due to the over weighting of small probabilities. However betting on odds...