This paper characterises the relationship between wealth and consumption in New Zealand. We find that there exists a long-run cointegration relation between household consumption, income, housing wealth and net financial wealth. Permanent shocks account for most of the variation in wealth. This...

We use two alternative methodologies to estimate an equilibrium value for the USD/NZD bilateral exchange rate. A cross-country comparison of prices for individual goods, augmented with a Balassa-Samuelson variable suggests that the New Zealand dollar was close to fairly valued in 1999, but...

We use the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's macroeconomic model (FPS) to look at the feasibility of using monetary policy to reduce variability in output, the exchange rate and interest rates while maintaining an inflation target. Our experiment suggests that policy could be altered to increase the...

The Forecasting and Policy System model (FPS) has been a very useful tool for forecasting and communication at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. In part, its success has been due to pragmatic use, and the evolution of the model to reflect changing views of the New Zealand economy. However, as...

We identify the timing of currency, banking crises and sudden stops in New Zealand from 1880 to 2008 using methodologies from the international literature and consider the extent to which the empirical models in that literature can explain New Zealand’s crisis history. We find that the cross...

We estimate the fair value of the New Zealand dollar using the macroeconomic balance approach. The model's elasticities are calibrated so that they are more appropriate to a small commodity-exporting economy. Over the 1990s, the model estimates that the fair value for the TWI fluctuated between...

This paper describes the development of SDS-FPS, which is a small demand-side model calibrated to match some of the dynamic properties of the Reserve Bank's Forecasting and Policy System (FPS) core model. SDS-FPS is capable of matching the dynamic properties of FPS for a wide range of...

The nature of expectations matters when conducting monetary policy. Models with a learning process can exhibit very different properties from models with other types of expectations rules. This paper draws on the work of Orphanides and Williams (2002), extending it to allow for the possibility...

This paper reviews the literature on applications of state- space modelling to macroeconomic questions, with four examples related to modelling unobserved trends, transition across different steady states, expectations formation and forecasting/data revision issues. Due to the flexibility of the...

The interest rate which corresponds to neutral monetary policy settings in New Zealand appears to have trended downwards since at least the stabilisation of inflation in 1992. We present several alternative estimates of a time varying neutral real interest rate (NRR) in state space models, which...