New Zealand data show that the inflation-output relationship is asymmetric. This asymmetry implies that positive demand shocks tend to increase inflation by more than negative demand shocks of similar magnitudes reduce it. An important implication of this asymmetry is that a monetary authority...

Modern economic theories explain differences in productivity and economic growth by differences in political and economic institutions, and differences in culture, geographical location, policies, and laws. Another new strand of the literature explains productivity and economic growth...

We confront microeconomic theory with macroeconomic data. Unemployment results from two main micro-level decisions of workers and firms. Most of the efficiency wage and bargaining theories predict that over the business cycle, unemployment falls below its natural rate when the worker’s real...

Unanticipated shocks could lead to instability, which is reflected in statistically significant changes in distributions of random variables. Changes in the conditional moments of stationary variables are predictable. We provide a framework based on a statistic for the Sample Generalized...

I extend the Glick and Rogoff (1995) aggregate time-series, empirical, intertemporal model of country-investment (and the current account) to a sectoral-level, and estimate it for New Zealand. I fit the model to panel data of eleven industries from 1988-2009. The sectoral-level investment growth...

We use the work-leisure choice model to compute equilibrium weekly hours worked for a number of Arab countries, where actual statistics are unavailable. We show that the labor supply curve is elastic in all Arab countries, and provide a new measure of labor productivity. This finding confirms...

A persistent increase in the unemployment rate ignites speculations about whether the changes to unemployment are structural or cyclical. The New Zealand economy has been through major restructuring since the mid-1980s. The labour market’s institutional changes were the last in the sequence of...

I extend the Glick and Rogoff (1995) aggregate time-series, empirical, intertemporal model of country-investment (and the current account) to a sectoral-level, and estimate it for New Zealand. I fit the model to panel data of eleven industries from 1988-2009. The sectoral-level investment growth...

A persistent increase in the unemployment rate ignites speculations about whether the changes to unemployment are structural or cyclical. The New Zealand economy has been through major restructuring since the mid-1980s. The labour market’s institutional changes were the last in the sequence of...