The 2002 Policy Targets Agreement (PTA) between the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the government asks the Reserve Bank to target inflation "over the medium term" rather than over an annual target. This medium term objective shifts inflation targeting towards a "halfway-house" between inflation...

We evaluate the performance of an open economy DSGE-VAR model for New Zealand along both forecasting and policy dimensions. We show that forecasts froma DSGE-VAR and a "vanilla" DSGE model are competitive with, and in some dimensions superrior to, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's official...

We estimate underlying macroeconomic policy objectives of three of the earliest explicit inflation targeters - Australia, Canada and New Zealand - within the context of a small open economy DSGE model. We assume central banks set policy optimally, such that we can reverse engineer policy...

This paper examines stabilisation bias - the difference between the inferior macroeconomic outcomes attained with discretionary monetary policy relative to the ideal that could be attained with commitment policy. The paper works within the linear-quadratic framework and represents the monetary...

This paper quantifies the costs of mitigating exchange rate volatility within the context of a flexible inflation targeting central bank. Within a standard linearquadratic formulation of inflation targeting, we append a term that penalises deviations in the exchange rate to the central bank’s...

Typical New Keynesian open economy models suggest a limited response to the exchange rate. This paper examines the role of the open economy in determining robust rules when the central bank fears various model misspecification errors. The paper calibrates a hybrid New Keynesian model to broadly...

Under a Bayesian framework of model uncertainty, closed economy models of monetary policy typically suggest that policy responses should be attenuated. Conversely, under a Knightian view of uncertainty, where the policymaker cannot specify probabilities across alternative models, intensifying...

We construct a DSGE-VAR model for competing head to head with the long history of published forecasts of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. We also construct a Bayesian VAR model with a Minnesota prior for forecast comparison. The DSGE-VAR model combines a structural DSGE model with a statistical...