We discuss case studies of three South Island small towns: Ashburton, Timaru and Oamaru and their wider local authority jurisdictions, focusing on how local stake-holders are defining the issues facing these places and identifying, prioritising and investing in regeneration initiatives,...

In this paper we introduce a new testing procedure for evaluating the rationality of fixed-event forecasts based on a pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator. The procedure is designed to be robust to departures in the normality assumption. A model is introduced to show that such departures are...

The research programme on multiple job holding identified substantial discrepancies between the Census and HLFS series regarding the increasing level of rural multiple job holding 1981 to 2001. Furthermore, evidence from the Time Use Survey suggests that the distribution of second job...

We examine excess comovement in commodity prices and the extent to which this can be explained by the role of commodities in portfolio diversification. We estimate the proportion of investor wealth that should be allocated to commodities in order to maximize expected utility over time and...

The authors estimate a price-conditional vector autoregression for individual company dividends and this is used to forecast future dividends. Stocks are then ranked by the ratio of their current price relative to future dividend forecasts. This ranking is shown to forecast returns, using...

A number of methods of evaluating the validity of interval forecasts of financial data are analysed, and illustrated using intraday FTSE100 index futures returns. Some existing interval forecast evaluation techniques, such as the Markov chain approach of Christoffersen (1998), are shown to be...