There has recently been widespread public debate and media attention around housing affordability. This paper discusses the concept of affordability as it applies to housing, examines the approaches used to measure affordability, and then documents the aggregate evidence for New Zealand over the...

Reliable estimates of actual household saving rates in New Zealand have proved elusive as existing sources of data have in the past given disparate estimates, making it difficult to reach a consensus of the real rate of household saving. For the first time in New Zealand, however, longitudinal...

The housing market is both large and complex. This paper develops a simple model that captures the essential features of the supply and demand for housing, and which is used to evaluate the impact of a range of policy interventions. Increases in the stock of housing would reduce rents and house...

In recent years, the total debt of the household sector has risen appreciably. This has led to concerns about “excessive” borrowing, and to the possibility that some households may have become unduly vulnerable in the event of unexpected shocks. This paper draws on both aggregate and...

In 2001, Statistics New Zealand conducted a major survey of the assets and liabilities of New Zealanders called the Household Savings Survey (HSS). This paper presents the results of an analysis of ownership and investment in housing based on the results of that survey. International comparisons...

This paper extends the 'top-down' framework, introduced by Robilliard et al. (2001), to link a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to a microsimulation model. The proposed approach allows the linking of a microsimulation model to a dynamic, and not simply a static, CGE model by enabling...

This paper extends the ‘top-down’ framework developed by Robilliard et al. (2001) to link a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to a microsimulation (MS) model. The proposed approach allows for the linking of an MS model to a dynamic (rather than static) CGE model. The approach relies...