The aim of this paper is to provide an introduction to the concept of user cost and its determinants. Particular attention is given to the influence of taxation. The concept of user cost relates to the rental, the rate of return to capital, that arises in a profit maximising situation in which...

The paper examines the outcomes of youth not in education, employment or training (NEET) up to four years after the initial long-term spell of NEET. The paper covers outcomes of NEETs in relation to benefit receipt, education, employment and future inactivity. These outcomes are compared across...

This paper examines the relationship between the New Zealand government yield curve and the contribution of global and domestic factors influencing it. We apply the Nelson and Siegel method, which has been widely used internationally for fitting a yield curve, to decompose it into three...

This paper explores, in the context of the Atkinson inequality measure, attempts to make interpretations of orders of magnitude transparent. One suggestion is that the analogy of sharing a cake among a very small number of people provides a useful intuitive description for people who want some...

This paper examines the labour supply responses to the Working for Families (WfF) package of welfare reforms, which was fully implemented in 2008. The policy changes were implemented with the aim to encourage benefit recipients to participate in the labour market and to address income adequacy...

The objective of the paper is to explore the saving and consumption responses of a representative household to a range of policy interventions such as changes in taxes and pension settings. To achieve this, it develops a two-period life-cycle model. The representative household maximises...

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...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the absolute and relative income mobility in disposable income in New Zealand using the full longitudinal data from the Survey of Family, Income and Employment (SoFIE) from 2002 to 2010. To summarise the patterns of mobility, we analyse the income changes...

When measuring inequality, value judgements are imposed, often implicitly, at several stages. In particular, the choice of ‘welfare metric’, adult equivalence scale, unit of analysis and the inequality measure itself cannot avoid value judgements. This paper illustrates the effects of using...

The main purpose of this paper is to supplement the existing literature by quantifying the elasticity of New Zealand’s current account to changes in the real exchange rate. The unusual composition of New Zealand’s current account balance – particularly the large income deficit and the...