Reserve Bank discussion papers (with abstracts) for 2010
Reserve Bank discussion and research papers present the detailed scholarly research of staff economists and visiting scholars. The papers are published throughout the year mainly for academic and professional economists.
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DP2010/14
Monetary Policy, Inflation and Unemployment
By Nicolas Groshenny (PDF 590KB)
To what extent did deviations from the Taylor rule between 2002 and 2006 help to promote price stability and maximum sustainable employment? To address that question, this paper estimates a New Keynesian model with unemployment and performs a counterfactual experiment where monetary policy strictly follows a Taylor rule over the period 2002:Q1 - 2006:Q4. The paper finds that such a policy would have generated a sizeable increase in unemployment and resulted in an undesirably low rate of inflation. Around mid-2004, when the counterfactual deviates the most from the actual series, the model indicates that the probability of an unemployment rate greater than 8 percent would have been as high as 80 percent, while the probability of an inflation rate above 1 percent would have been close to zero.
DP2010/13
What drives core inflation? A dynamic factor model analysis of tradable and nontradable prices
I develop a new estimate of core inflation for New Zealand and Australia based on a dynamic factor model. By using an over-identification restriction, the factors of the model are classified as tradable and nontradable factors. This innovation allows us to examine the relative contributions of tradable and nontradable prices towards core inflation. The results show that core inflation in both countries is primarily driven by the nontradable factor. The nontradable factor also explains significantly more of the variance in headline inflation relative to the tradable factor. Finally, both the tradable and nontradable factors show similar profiles across both countries suggesting common drivers.
DP2010/12
Monetary policy implementation and uncovered interest parity: empirical evidence from Oceania
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 become more sensitive to the short-term interest differential over time. Most important, after the introduction of the Official Cash Rate regime in New Zealand, the responsiveness of the exchange rate has accelerated to such an extent that it is incompatible with UIP. Evidence on UIP over longer horizons is mixed with a 10-year horizon since 1990 providing the strongest support for the theory.
DP2010/11
This article establishes that most yield curve models within the popular Nelson and Siegel (1987, hereafter NS) class may be obtained as a formal Taylor approximation to the dynamic component of the generic Gaussian affine term structure model outlined in Dai and Singleton (2002). That fundamental theoretical foundation provides an assurance to users of NS models that they correspond to a well-accepted set of principles and assumptions for modeling the yield curve and its dynamics. Indeed, arbitrage-free NS models will parsimoniously and reliably represent the data generated by any Gaussian affine term structure model regardless of its true number of underlying factors and specification, and even non-arbitrage-free NS models will adequately capture the dynamics of the state variables. Combined with the well-established practical benefits of applying NS models, the theoretical foundation provides a compelling case for applying NS models as standard tools for yield curve modeling and analysis in economics and finance. As an illustration, this article develops a two-factor arbitrage-free NS model and applies it to testing for changes in United States yield curve dynamics. The results confirm those of Rudebusch and Wu (2007) based on a latent two-factor essentially affine term structure model: there was a material change in the behavior of the yield curve between the sample prior to 1988 and the sample from 1988 onwards.
DP2010/10
We conduct an event study that examines how the New Zealand - US (NZ/US) and
the Australia - US (AU/US) exchange rates responds to the release of Australian
macroeconomic news including the CPI, GDP, trade balance, and monetary policy
decisions. We use two different measures of the unanticipated component of the
news announcements. First, we use the difference between the actual value of the
data and a survey of market participants' expectations of that data
announcement. Second, we use the immediate response of the AU/US exchange rate
to the news announcement.
Our study has three main conclusions: 1) We show
that the effects of the macro news in one country can also transmit to another
country via the non-bilateral exchange rate (probably in anticipation of future
spill-over effects). 2) Combined with results that show that the AU/US exchange
rate responds by very little to New Zealand news, the results suggest that the
low variation in the New Zealand - Australia cross rate is because both
currencies respond in a similar fashion to Australian (but not New Zealand)
macroeconomic data. 3) We highlight the problems associated with the events
studies in which the surprises are calculated from a market price and propose a
new estimator that overcomes this problem.
DP2010/09
Debt Dynamics and Excess Sensitivity of Consumption to Transitory Wealth Changes
We analyse the consumption-wealth relationship using a framework that accounts for transitory variation in wealth, and in a setting where transitory variation in household net worth is not dominated by boom and bust cycles in stock markets. We find that transitory variation in consumption depends positively on recent transitory changes in wealth. In addition, we find that gross asset wealth and household debt are positively related. Both findings constitute departures from standard lifecycle/ permanent income hypothesis theory with complete financial markets, but can be explained by the introduction of liquidity constraints.
DP2010/08
Intertemporal Choice: A Nash Bargaining Approach
A compelling, but highly tractable, axiomatic foundation for intertemporal decision making is established and discussed. This axiomatic foundation relies on methods employed in cooperative bargaining theory. Four simple axioms imply that the intertemporal objective function is a weighted geometric average of each period's utility function. This is in contrast to standard practice, which takes the objective function to be a weighted arithmetic average. The analysis covers both finite and infinite time.
DP2010/07
Exporting and performance: Market entry, expansion and destination characteristics
We examine the effect of export market entry on New Zealand firm performance. Our novel contribution to the literature is the treatment of export status as an incremental process, in which firms may export to one or more markets with each of these markets providing additional potential for learning to occur. Focussing on new markets provides several benefits. Since we use matching techniques to account for self-selection, controlling for firm export histories reduces the problem of selection on unobservables (such as managerial preferences) which would confound a causal interpretation. Also, most new market entry is undertaken by incumbent exporters, providing a large number of events on which to test the learning-by-exporting (LBE) hypothesis.
DP2010/06
Consider an n-person bargaining problem where players bargain over the division of a cake whose size is stochastic. In such a game, the players are not only bargaining over the division of a cake, but they are also sharing risk. This paper presents the Nash bargaining solution to this problem, investigates its properties, and highlights a few special cases.
DP2010/05
Using estimated models to assess nominal and real rigidities in the United Kingdom
This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of inflation dynamics in the United Kingdom by estimating two dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models and assessing the role of nominal and real rigidities within them. We first obtain an empirical representation of the monetary transmission mechanism in the United Kingdom and then estimate the models by minimising the difference between this representation and its model equivalents. We find that both models can explain the data reasonably well without relying on undue amounts of price and wage stickiness.
DP2010/04
Internationalised Production in a Small Open Economy
We show that internationalised production, modelled as trade in intermediate goods, brings the dynamics of a small open economy closer to that observed in the data. We build a stylized new-Keynesian small open economy model and we show that when production is internationalised, movements of international relative prices affect the economy through an additional channel, denoted as the “cost channel”. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, this channel (i) increases the share of output variance explained by foreign shocks, consistent with empirical evidence, (ii) implies that the exchange rate pass-through is closer to estimated values, and (iii) increases the international correlation of output relative to that of consumption.
DP2010/03
Multi-period fixed-rate loans, housing and monetary policy in small open economies
We investigate the implications of the existence of multi-period fixed-rate loans for the behaviour of a small open economy exposed to finance shocks and housing boom-and-bust cycles. To this end, we propose a simple and analytically tractable method of incorporating multi-period debt into an otherwise standard consumer problem. Our simulations show that multi-period fixed-rate contracts can help insulate the economy from the adverse effects of particular shocks. This insulating mechanism is particularly effective for countries with high debt positions exposed to foreign exchange fluctuations, or countries operating a fixed exchange rate regime.
DP2010/02
All together now: Do international factors explain relative price co-movements?
Recent research has found evidence of increasing co-movement in CPI inflation rates across industrialised countries. This paper considers whether this increased international co-movement in inflation rates can be attributed to greater global integration of product markets. To examine this question, we use a data set of 28 matched product category price indices for 14 advanced economies for 1998Q1 - 2008Q2, and decompose the inflation rates into a world factor, country-specific factors, and category-specific factors using a Bayesian dynamic factor model with Gibbs sampling. We find that the category-specific factors account for a large part of the co-movement in the prices of goods which are intensive in internationally traded primary commodities; but this is less evident for other traded goods. We also find that both the world factor and the category-specific factors become more significant in explaining the movement in the relative prices in the second half of our sample.
DP2010/01
Over much of the past 40 years, cycles of house price and consumption growth have been closely synchronised in New Zealand. Three main hypotheses for this co-movement have been proposed in the literature. Firstly, an increase in house prices increase homeowners wealth, which increases their desired level of expenditure. Secondly, rising house prices may also facilitate additional consumption by reducing credit constraints to homeowners. Finally, house prices and consumption have been influenced by common factors, including expectations of future income growth. This paper uses repeated cross sectional analysis of household level data over the 1984 to 2007 period to ascertain which of these hypotheses is more valid for the New Zealand case. A positive correlation between real house prices and real household expenditures is evident for most tenure and age groupings. However, findings from this paper suggest that the house price and consumption relation is predominantly driven by wealth effects.
Discussion paper correspondence can be directed to:
Economics Department
Reserve Bank of New
Zealand
PO Box 2498
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