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...

This paper introduces a new indicator of core inflation for New Zealand, estimated using a dynamic factor model and disaggregate price data. Using disaggregate price data we can directly compare the predictive performance of our core indicator with a wide range of other ‘core 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 from a DSGE-VAR and a 'vanilla' DSGE model are competitive with, and in some dimensions superior to, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's official...

We examine the informational content of New Zealand data releases using a parametric dynamic factor model estimated with unbalanced real-time panels of quarterly data. The data are categorised into 21 different release blocks, allowing us to make 21 different factor model forecasts each quarter....

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 (often Bayesian) techniques for computation and inference, providing a supplement to the...

We describe a simple extension of the Monacelli (2005) small open economy model that incorporates a non-tradable good, habit persistence and price indexation. The empirical fit of eight different specifications of this model is then tested in a Bayesian framework using data for three small open...

We develop a large Bayesian VAR (BVAR) model of the New Zealand economy that incorporates the conditional forecasting estimation techniques of Waggoner and Zha (1999). We examine the real-time forecasting performance as the size of the model increases using an unbalanced data panel. In a...

This paper examines the relationship between wages and consumer prices in New Zealand over the last 15 years. Reflecting the open nature of the New Zealand economy, the headline CPI is disaggregated into non-tradable and tradable prices. We find that there is a joint causality between wages and...

This paper focuses on forecasting four key New Zealand macroeconomic variables using a dynamic factor model and a large number of predictors. We compare the (simulated) real-time forecasting performance of the factor model with a variety of other time series models and gauge the sensitivity of...

We utilise prior information from a simple RBC model to improve ARMA forecasts of post-war US GDP. We develop three alternative ARMA forecasting processes that use varying degrees of information from the Campbell (1994) flexible labour model. Directly calibrating the model produces poor...