The close integration of Australian and New Zealand financial markets and the similarity of the monetary policy regimes provide the perfect backdrop for testing the empirical relevance of uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) in Oceania. We find that changes in the bilateral exchange rate have...

The close integration of Australian and New Zealand financial markets and the similarity of the monetary policy regimes provide the perfect backdrop for testing the empirical relevance of uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) in Oceania. We find that changes in the bilateral exchange rate have...

The global financial crisis and subsequent recession have highlighted the huge costs that financial imbalances can impose on an economy. Because the financial crisis was in large part the result of specific vulnerabilities in the banking sector, reform proposals are accordingly focused on...

This note analyses the relationship between actual and expected Official Cash Rate (OCR) changes and subsequent exchange rate movements. It concludes that there has been a weak positive relationship between OCR changes (or expected changes) and the currency, but that this only applies over very...

The repurchase (‘repo’) market was a key channel through which the Global Financial Crisis was transmitted. With activity in these markets now recovering, pressure is mounting for regulators elsewhere to increase the resilience of repo markets so that they become a more stable source of...

The operating procedure of a central bank influences in no small measure whether the behavior of interest rates is consistent with the expectations hypothesis. In New Zealand, the predictive content of the term spread improves markedly in the wake of the switch from a quantity-based to a...

This paper presents a simple open-economy forward-looking model to underscore the important role of the real exchange rate channel in the conduct of optimal monetary policy. As opposed to the closed economy, optimal monetary policy in the open economy depends on both demand-side and supply-side...

This paper compares optimal monetary policy under discretion and commitment in an economy where the direct exchange rate channel is operative. The stabilization bias under discretion is shown to be weaker in an open economy relative to a closed economy. In an open economy, a 'less conservative...

This paper examines the relative merits of alternative monetary policy rules for a small open economy. Rules considered target: the exchange rate, price level, nominal income, or a monetary aggregate. The standard framework employed in previous comparisons of these rules fails to take account of...

Monetary conditions indices featured prominently as instrument variables or operating targets, particularly in the inflation-targeting countries during the 1990s. In this paper, we show that conventional monetary conditions indices are potentially mis-specified. Under a regime of strict...