Using data from the Household Economic Survey we examine the vulnerability of several cohorts of owner-occupiers who had recently taken out mortgages. We focus particularly on the period leading up to the introduction of the "speed limit" on high LVR mortgage lending.

Commercial property lending has been the main reason for defaults during most financial crises, bothinternationally and in New Zealand. With the commercial property market recovering strongly, this article reviews the structure of the New Zealand market and its relationship to financial...

The Reserve Bank has recently developed a macro-prudential policy toolkit. This article considers how macro-prudential policy could interact with the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy function. While these policies are set with the differing objectives of financial and price stability,...

A good farm price measure captures the price that a 'representative' farm would sell for each period. In reality, though, there is no representative farm and, even if there was, it would not sell every period anyway. Farms are not like bottles of milk. They are not identical and their prices are...

This paper studies the importance of intertemporal substitution in consumption for the cyclical co-movement of consumption, net worth and income. We can largely explain the empirical hump-shaped consumption response to a transitory wealth increase by allowing for time-varying returns in an...