Most specifications of Okun's law assume a symmetric relationship between changes in unemployment and real output. We test this assumption for seven OECD countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States). We find that failure to take account of...

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...

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...

New Zealand is acknowledged widely as the first country to implement a formal monetary policy agreement specifying an explicit inflation target. This agreement, signed in March 1990 between the Minister of Finance and the Governor of the Bank, was implemented under Section 9 of the Reserve Bank...

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...