What characteristics push people to move and what pulls them to a new location? Evidence from the US has suggested that people are pulled to cities with a high population density and with large concentrations of skilled people. But how does this apply to New Zealand? Where are people moving to...

Many past and potential New Zealand reforms involve significant devolution, i.e. the transfer of authority to make decisions on behalf of society from a higher to a lower level of government. In particular the Resource Management Act (RMA), the health and education reforms, and decisions about...

This paper sets the stage for current Treasury research on New Zealand regional socio-economic issues by: - Outlining a basic theoretical framework; - Introducing a regional database and Geographic Information Systems, a new empirical tool for data analysis; and - Illustrating the potential of...

This paper provides an overview of key issues involved in the choice among market-based instruments for climate change policy. Specifically, it examines the potential net benefits from shifting to a permit system for emission reduction, and the preconditions necessary for this change. It also...

In health economic evaluation studies, to value productivity loss due to absenteeism, existing methods use wages as a proxy value for marginal productivity. This study is the first to test the equality between wage and marginal productivity losses due to absenteeism separately for team workers...

A number of studies have investigated the predictability of Chinese stock returns with economic variables. Given the newly emerged dataset from the Internet, this paper investigates whether the Baidu Index can be employed to predict Chinese stock returns. The empirical results show that 1) the...

New Zealand's unrelenting current account deficits, its trade performance and high external debt level remain central to ongoing economic policy debates. However, what has been overlooked in the discussion of New Zealand's economic relations with its trading partners is the positive contribution...

We explore individual lender behaviour on Renrendai.com, a leading Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) crowdlending platform. Using a sample of roughly 5 million investor-loan-hour observations and applying a high-dimension fixed effect estimator, we establish evidence of herding behaviour: the investors...

The informal sector has long been viewed as a locus of the disadvantaged, unskilled, and inexperienced workers in under-developed and developing economies. Workers in the informal sector, however, can learn skills and gain experience that could help them switch to better-paying jobs in the...