We estimate an unrestricted VAR to summarize the dynamics of the stringency of policy and COVID-19 infections in New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and the U.S. using the newly published Stringency Index by the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, Hale et al. (2020)....

We provide a general equilibrium model with optimizing agents to compute the natural rate of interest for the G7 countries over the period 2000 to 2017. The model is solved for the equilibrium natural rate of interest, which is determined by a parsimonious equation that is easily computed from...

Evidence-based policy of global warming is best relying on a relevant sample of data. We choose a sample of annual data from 1959 to-date to provide some statistically robust stylized facts about the relationships between actual CO2 and temperature. Visually, there is a clear upward trend in...

Since 1998 Hong Kong has experienced over 16 quarters of deflation. Some asset prices such as factory and office space prices started to fall in early 1990s, a long time before the Asian crisis. The number of firms and businesses that have moved out of Hong Kong are not readily available, but it...

Qualification and occupation-based measures of skilled labour are constructed to explain the skill premium - the wage of skilled labour relative to unskilled labour in New Zealand. The data exhibit a more rapid growth in the supply of skilled labour than the skill premium, and a very large...

We show that the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) puzzle, whereby the half-life of the shock to the real exchange rate is long and unjustifiable by monetary and financial shocks, is a result of specification and estimation issues. We provide an alternative specification for PPP and show that the...

It is argued in this note that state-ownership and state-management of oil on behalf of the Iraqi people is not conducive to democracy and inconsistent with the principles of free market. Thus, we argued that state-ownership of oil (and gas) resources can adversely affect economic development...

I test the forward rate unbiasedness hypothesis using the Error Correction Model (ECM) of Naka and Whitney (1995). It is shown that the Naka-Whitney treatment of the dynamic is perhaps necessary to ameliorate existing problems associated with testing the hypothesis. However, it is not sufficient...

Since 1998 Hong Kong has experienced over 16 quarters of deflation. Some asset prices such as factory and office space prices started to fall in early 1990s, a long time before the Asian crisis. The number of firms and businesses that have moved out of Hong Kong are not readily available, but it...

New Zealand data show that the inflation-output relationship is asymmetric. This asymmetry implies that positive demand shocks tend to increase inflation by more than negative demand shocks of similar magnitudes reduce it. An important implication of this asymmetry is that a monetary authority...