Counterfactual experiments with the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's core model provide some insight into the implications for New Zealand's economic performance over the 1990s, had it credibly fixed its currency to the Australian dollar. If New Zealand had faced the relatively more stimulatory...

We compute classical real GDP business cycles and growth cycles, contrast classical recessions with 'technical' recessions, and assess the sensitivity of our peaks and troughs to data revisions. Calling a technical recession after two successive quarters of negative growth can provide...

There are no official quarterly real GDP estimates for New Zealand, for the period prior to 1977. We report the development of a seasonally adjusted series for a period of more than 60 years from mid-1947, and evaluate statistical properties. The series were developed by linking quarterly...

There is a common perception that the prices of unrelated commodities move together. This paper re-examines this notion, using a measure of co-movement of economic time series called concordance. Concordance measures the proportion of time that the prices of two commodities are concurrently in...

This paper examines the duration and magnitude of cycles in commodity prices. We find that for the majority of commodities, price slumps last longer than price booms. How far prices fall in a slump is found to be slightly larger than how far they tend to rebound in a subsequent boom. We also...