The Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC) include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Their monetary policy objective is to stabilize the foreign price, i.e., exchange rate instead of the domestic price level, where the nominal interest rate is equalized with the US...

I discuss econometric issues of high relevance to economists in central banks whose job is to interpret the permanency of shocks and provide policy advice to policymakers. Trend, unit root, and persistence are difficult to interpret. There are numerous econometric tests, which vary in their...

We examine the economic performance of Oman’s economy over the period from 1998 to 2016, where data are readily available. Our focus is on the performance of the non-hydrocarbon sector (NHC sector) relative to the hydrocarbon sector (HC sector), nominal versus real GDP growth, productivity...

We estimate a VAR, which summarizes the dynamics of five variables, the real price of oil, the long-run real interest rate, real GDP, the primary fiscal balance-GDP, and debt-GDP. We make dynamic stochastic projections and use the data to compute the annual primary fiscal balance required to...

Using the work – leisure choice model, this paper computes equilibrium hours-worked for a number of Arab, non-oil-producing and labor-abundant countries and major oil-producing, tax-free and labor-scarce countries, for which actual data are unavailable. We estimate hours-worked for the G7, and...

The Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC) include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Their monetary policy objective is to stabilize the foreign price, i.e., exchange rate instead of the domestic price level, where the nominal interest rate is equalized with the US...

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

We use the work-leisure choice model to estimate equilibrium labour supply (hours-worked) in New Zealand over the period 2000 – 2008. We then stochastically solve the model over a future period from 2010 to 2050, and evaluate the New Zealand’s new tax policy. We compare the welfare and...

We show that the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) puzzle, whereby the half-life of the shock to the real exchange rate is long and unjustifiable by monetary and financial shocks, is a result of specification and estimation issues. We provide an alternative specification for PPP and show that the...

As far as we know there has been no, or very little, empirical examination of search models and unemployment – vacancy relationship in New Zealand. We empirically examine dynamic matching functions in the New Zealand labor market over the period 1986-2006. Further, it is well documented that...