Recent research has found evidence of increasing comovement in CPI inflation rates across industrialised countries. This paper considers whether this can be attributed to greater global integration of product markets. To examine this question, we build a data set of 28 matched product category...

It has been suggested that the New Zealand economy may have similar characteristics and face similar shocks to some Australian states, so lowering the costs of a trans-Tasman currency union. We test this, under the assumption that differences in Taylor rule-implied interest rate paths for...

Transmission mechanisms are the channels through which monetary policy affects macroeconomic variables, such as GDP and inflation. Differences in transmission mechanisms can generate asymmetric behaviour among currency union partners when they experience shocks. This has the potential to widen...

Among developed economies, New Zealand is one of the countries that experienced a large increase in personal income inequality since the mid 1980s. This paper focuses on income inequality at the regional level. Smith (2000) and Karagedikli et al. (2000) found that the variation in mean income...

Real Business Cycle (RBC) and Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) methods have become essential components of the macroeconomist’s toolkit. This literature review stresses recently developed techniques for computation and inference, providing a supplement to the Romer (2006)...

The merits of a trans-Tasman currency union have been debated in both New Zealand and Australia. It has been suggested that the New Zealand economy may not behave too differently from at least some of the Australian states, ie they have similar characteristics and they face similar shocks. We...

The interest rate which corresponds to neutral monetary policy settings in New Zealand appears to have trended downwards since at least the stabilisation of inflation in 1992. We present several alternative estimates of a time varying neutral real interest rate (NRR) in state space models, which...

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) is regarded as one of the most transparent central banks in the world. Recent research suggests that one benefit of such transparency is that financial markets better anticipate a central bank's reaction to incoming data and, in relation, do not over-react...

It has been suggested that the New Zealand economy may have similar characteristics and face similar shocks to some Australian states, so lowering the costs of a trans-Tasman currency union. We test this, under the assumption that differences in Taylor rule-implied interest rate paths for...

We conduct a high frequency event analysis to estimate the effects of monetary policy surprises, data surprises, and central bank verbal statements on the New Zealand-US dollar and the New Zealand-Australian dollar exchange rates. We find data surprises and monetary policy surprises have...