For more than four decades, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) has conducted a two-question, quarterly survey of architect forecasts of public and private sector construction expenditure. This qualitative survey is published one week after the end of each quarter and nine...

This paper reassesses a finding by Martin Prachowny (1993) that the value of the Okun coefficient for the United States (linking unemployment changes to output changes) is only around -0.67 rather than around the more typical value of -2.25. Using a cointegration framework, and the same data...

The qualitative responses that firms give to business survey questions regarding changes in their own output provide a real-time signal of official output changes. The most commonly used method to produce an aggregate quantitative indicator from business survey responses-the net balance or...

Markov regime-switching analysis is used to consider the relationship between business confidence and the probability of turning points in cyclical GDP. We find, in an application to New Zealand, that confidence is related to both the deepness and duration of the business cycle and is asymmetric...