Many U.S. government policies aim to encourage homeownership. We use a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents to consider the effects of temporary homebuyer tax credits and the asymmetric tax treatment of owner-occupied and rental housing on prices, quantities, allocations, and welfare. The model suggests that homebuyer tax credits temporarily raise house prices and transaction volumes, but have negative effects on welfare. Removing the asymmetric tax treatment of owner-occupied and rental housing can generate welfare gains for a majority of agents across steady states, but welfare impacts are substantially more varied along the transitions between steady states.

This paper investigates labour market dynamics in New Zealand by estimating a structural small open economy model enriched with standard search and matching frictions in the labour market. We show that the model fits the business cycle features of key macroeconomic variables reasonably well and provides an appealing monetary transmission mechanism. We then extend our analysis to examine the driving forces behind labour market variables. Our findings suggest that the bulk of variation in labour market variables is solely explained by disturbances pertaining to the labour market.

Linked employer-employee data from New Zealand is used to study the relationship between a firm’s productivity growth and its exposure to outside knowledge through the hiring of new workers with previous work experience. The estimated relationship between productivity growth and hiring is compared to the predictions implied by two different channels: worker quality and knowledge spillover. Although it is not possible to identify a causal relationship, the productivity of a worker’s previous employer is correlated with subsequent productivity growth at the hiring firm. The patterns of this correlation are consistent with both the worker quality and knowledge spillover channels operating simultaneously. Furthermore, if knowledge spillover is occurring, the results suggest the type of knowledge spilling over relates to technological knowledge allowing firms to become more capital intensive, rather than knowledge that improves the efficiency of utilising existing inputs.

This paper develops an endogenous growth model in which the job-to-job transition of workers provides a channel for the spillover of knowledge between firms. Workers learn some of the productive knowledge used by their employer while working on the job. When a worker moves to another firm, they are able to adapt some of this knowledge for use at the hiring firm. Firms endogenously control their exposure to new knowledge by choosing the intensity that they post vacancies in a search-and-matching labor market. It is shown that under a set of assumptions regarding the initial distribution of firm types and the vacancy posting cost function, the competitive equilibrium leads to a balanced growth path that has a constant growth rate and stationary distribution of firm size.

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.

Natural rates are an important concept within the new Keynesian models often used for monetary policy advice. However, many of these models rely on demeaned interest rate and inflation data. Thus, they implicitly impose the strict assumption that the natural rates of these series are constant. Using New Zealand data and a small open-economy new Keynesian model with time-varying parameters, we estimate the natural real rate of interest, inflation target, potential output, and neutral real exchange rate. We find that the model estimates of the natural real rate of interest and neutral exchange rate display noticeable time variation and considerable uncertainty, while the inflation target has been relatively stable over the sample period. We also compare the results of this model to a model with time-invariant natural rates. The comparison reveals the data prefers the fit of the timevarying model. It also shows that allowing the natural rates to vary over time has implications for the persistence parameters and impulse responses of the model.