On-going debate of a Pacific Islands currency union has rekindled the argument on whether Pacific Island Countries (PICs) demonstrate symmetric behavior in their business cycles as a precondition for a union according to the OCA theory. Unfortunately for the PICs, there are no empirical studies...

Time series analyses generally rely on having a relatively high frequency of consistent and reliable data to work with. However for many of the South Pacific Island Nations (SPINS), data on major macroeconomic series, like GDP, are typically available only annually from the early 1980s. This...

This paper re-kindles the debate on the feasibility of a Pacific Islands currency union in view of the recent expansion and consolidation of regional strategies and agreements such as the ÔPacific PlanÕ and the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations Plus. These initiatives, including...

Time series analyses generally rely on having a relatively high frequency of consistent and reliable data to work with. However for many South Pacific Island Nations (SPINs), data on macroeconomic series, like GDP, are typically available only annually from the 1980s onwards. This paper...

We experimentally test an endogenous-timing investment model in which subjects privately observe their cost of investing and a signal correlated with the common investment return. Subjects overinvest, relative to Nash. We separately consider whether subjects draw inferences, in hindsight, and...

This paper proposes to model the error term in smooth transition autoregressive target zone model as Gaussian with stochastic volatility (STARTZ-SV) or as Student-t with GARCH volatility (STARTZ-TGARCH). Using the dynamics of Norwegian krone exchange rate index, we show that both models produce...

We use a second-price common-value auction, the maximal game, to experimentally study whether the Winner’s Curse (WC) can be explained by models which retain best-response behavior but allow for inconsistent beliefs. In the maximal game, the WC can be rationalized only by a belief that others...

This study engineers a household sector where individuals process macroeconomic information to reproduce consumption spending patterns in New Zealand. To do this, heterogeneous artificial neural networks (ANNs) are trained to forecast changes in consumption. In contrast to existing literature,...

This study explores the value of information transmission in training heterogeneous Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models to identify patterns in the growth rate of aggregate per-capita consumption spending in New Zealand. A tier structure is used to model how information passes from one ANN to...

In this paper we propose an asymptotically equivalent single-step alternative to the two-step partially linear model estimator in Robinson (1988). The estimator not only has the potential to decrease computing time dramatically, it shows substantial finite sample gains in Monte Carlo simulations.