New Zealand is acknowledged widely as the first country to implement a formal monetary policy agreement specifying an explicit inflation target. This agreement, signed in March 1990 between the Minister of Finance and the Governor of the Bank, was implemented under Section 9 of the Reserve Bank...

This paper offers new insights into Beveridge curve analysis by modelling the vacancy-unemployment rate relationship within a Markov regime-switching environment in which the probability of curve-shifting is determined endogenously by shift factors. Shift factor candidates include structural...

Data on the flow of workers moving between employment, unemployment and non-participation provide some of the most interesting and useful insights into labour market outcomes. These insights include information on the number and probability of workers moving between labour market states from,...

Business confidence announcements attract widespread attention, yet relatively little is known about the series itself. What, for example, does an improvement or deterioration in business confidence mean? We consider this question using a panel of firm-level responses to a business opinion...

The ANZ Bank publishes a monthly count of the number of job advertisements appearing in New Zealand newspapers and, more recently, internet sites. It is New Zealand’s de facto vacancy or help-wanted series. Apart from its role in economic commentaries, there is very little published research...

The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) has conducted and published a quarterly survey of business opinion continuously, and with largely unchanged questions, since June 1961. The Institute’s Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion (QSBO) is a business tendency survey based...

It is now commonplace to study labour market dynamics using flows data from labour force panel surveys. The analysis of labour market flows to and from the states of employment, unemployment and non-participation has received most attention. This paper considers some New Zealand aspects of these...

Markov regime-switching analysis is used to consider the relationship between business confidence and the probability of turning points in cyclical GDP. We find, in an application to New Zealand, that confidence is related to both the deepness and duration of the business cycle and is asymmetric...

The now widespread use of the internet as a source of information on job vacancies may have undermined the usefulness of newspaper advertisements - and possibly surveys - as the traditional sources of timely, cost-effective and accurate information on labour market openings. This paper outlines...

Okun's law - the relationship between unemployment and output - is one of the best known empirical regularities in macroeconomics. It is an important relationship because the way in which unemployment reacts to changes in output has implications for labour market and monetary policies and for...