Recipients of NZAE Conference 2023 prizes

Congratulations to the following recipients of prizes associated with NZAE Conference 2023. More detail on each prize is available at https://nzae.org.nz/prizes/

David Teece Prize in Industrial Organisation and Firm Behaviour Doriani Lingga, Simona Fabrizi & Steffen Lippert: “The News Media Bargaining Code: A two-sided Market Framework”
New Zealand Economic Policy Prize Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy: “Evaluating the Long-Run Effects of Zoning Reforms on Urban Development”
A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics Daniel Watt: “On the Effect of Social Housing in New Zealand”
NZIER Poster prize – open Linda Tran: “Measuring the wellbeing impacts of urban regeneration“
NZIER Poster prize – student Linda Tran: “Measuring the wellbeing impacts of urban regeneration“
People’s Choice Poster Linda Tran: “Measuring the wellbeing impacts of urban regeneration“
Jan Whitwell Doctoral Stuart Donovan: “An urban overhead? Crimes, amenities, and agglomeration economies”
Jan Whitwell Bachelors / Masters Maui Brennan: “The effect of Workfare on Material Well-being: Evidence from the 2012 Welfare Reform”
Best NZ Economics Honours Dissertation Daniel Watt: ”On the Effect of Social Housing in New Zealand”
Seamus Hogan Research Prize Doriani Lingga, Simona Fabrizi & Steffen Lippert: “The News Media Bargaining Code: A two-sided Market Framework”
Stata Prize for Excellence in Graphics Communications Guanyu Zheng & Marea Sing: “Sectoral reallocation and income growth in the labour market during the COVID-19 pandemic”
Stats NZ Prize Stuart Donovan, Thomas de Graaff, Henri L.F. de Groot & Aaron Schiff: “An urban overhead? Crimes, agglomeration and amenity”

Recipients of NZAE Conference 2022 prizes

Congratulations to the following recipients of prizes associated with NZAE Conference 2022. More detail on each prize is available at https://nzae.org.nz/prizes/

David Teece Prize in Industrial Organisation and Firm Behaviour Tim Ng – Business practices, dynamic capabilities and firm performance in New Zealand: unpacking the black box of innovation
New Zealand Economic Policy Prize Stuart Donovan, Thomas de Graaff, Arthur Grimes, Henri L.F. de Groot, David C. Maré – Cities with forking paths? Agglomeration economies in New Zealand 1976
NZIER Poster prize – open Alexandra Turcu – The impacts of COVID-19 on earnings trajectories and New Zealand’s underutilised workforce
NZIER Poster prize – student Alexandra Turcu – The impacts of COVID-19 on earnings trajectories and New Zealand’s underutilised workforce
People’s Choice Poster Alexandra Turcu – The impacts of COVID-19 on earnings trajectories and New Zealand’s underutilised workforce
Jan Whitwell Doctoral Jaimie Monk – The effect of screen time on child behaviour problems: an instrumental variable approach
Jan Whitwell Bachelors / Masters Robbie Maris – Social Media and the Evolution of Vaccine Preferences During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Seamus Hogan Research Prize Michael Ryan – New Zealand’s lauded fiscal legislation: Has it reduced fiscal uncertainty?
Stata Prize for Excellence in Graphics Communications Stuart Donovan, Thomas de Graaff, Arthur Grimes, Henri L.F. de Groot, David C. Maré – Cities with forking paths? Agglomeration economies in New Zealand 1976
Stats NZ Prize Tim Ng – Business practices, dynamic capabilities and firm performance in New Zealand II: unpacking the black box

Congratulations to recipients of NZAE Conference 2021 prizes

Congratulations to the following recipients of prizes associated with NZAE Conference 2021. More detail on each prize is available at https://nzae.org.nz/prizes/

David Teece Prize in Industrial Organisation and Firm Behaviour Tim Ng – Schumpeterian endogenous growth and dynamic capabilities: an under-researched nexus?
New Zealand Economic Policy Prize Alexander Plum – The Role of Ethnicity in Criminal Behavior
NZIER Poster prize – open Nazila Alinaghi – Income Inequality and Mobility in New Zealand: Evidence from Administrative Data
NZIER Poster prize – student Shabana Kamal – Impact of droughts on farm debts: Empirical evidence from New Zealand
People’s Choice Poster Tom Coupe – Who is the most sought-after economist? Ranking economists using Google Trends
Jan Whitwell Doctoral Cameron Birchall – Allocating the commons: Commercial lobbying in New Zealand’s largest public fishery
Jan Whitwell Bachelors / Masters Shakked Noy – The effects of neighbourhood and workplace income comparisons on subjective wellbeing
Seamus Hogan Research Prize Shakked Noy – The effects of neighbourhood and workplace income comparisons on subjective wellbeing
Stata Prize for Excellence in Graphics Communications Philip Vermeulen – Monetary policy, investment, and firm heterogeneity
Stats NZ Prize Kabir Dasgupta – Leaving the past behind – Effect of Clean Slate Regulation on Employment and Earnings

14th A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics to Livvy Mitchell

Congratulations to Olivia (Livvy) Mitchell, who was awarded the 2021 A. R. Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics for her paper “A Policy Evaluation of Home Detention Sentencing: Evidence from New Zealand”. The Bergstrom Prize, which is administered by the New Zealand Association of Economists Education Trust, can be awarded every two years and aims to reward the achievement of excellence in econometrics as evidenced by a research paper in any area of econometrics.

Olivia’s paper investigates the causal effects of New Zealand’s 1 October 2007 introduction of home detention as a stand-alone sentence on offender recidivism and labour market attachment. To determine the local average treatment effects of home detention, relative to similarly ranked sentences, the paper employs fuzzy regression discontinuity design and two-staged least squares instrumental variables applied to population-wide data from the Integrated Data Infrastructure managed by Statistics New Zealand.

The analysis shows no evidence that home detention affects the recidivism rate of first-time offenders, a result counter to a 2011 review by the Ministry of Justice, or that home detention increases the offender’s attachment to the labour market. A range of robustness tests indicate that the overall conclusions are not sensitive to variations in estimation methods, offender sample, recidivism period and definition, sentence categorization rules, and re-offence type.

Olivia interprets the results to imply that there is little justification for promoting home detention as a means for reducing crime or improving offenders’ short-term or long-term labour market positions. Nevertheless, as noted in the paper, the clear benefits of expanding New Zealand’s home detention scheme are the cost-savings to the taxpayers and the easing of prison overpopulation.

In their assessment of Olivia’s paper the adjudicators, Dr Iris Claus, Professor Mark Holmes, and Dr Leo Krippner, were highly complimentary. “The paper is well written and structured. The econometric methods are carefully explained and the author appears to be well on top of the econometric theory and application.” More generally, the adjudicators noted that Olivia’s paper provides an excellent example of how careful econometrics can contribute to public policy debates, in this case about the effectiveness of home detention in New Zealand.

13th A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics to James Graham

Congratulations to James Graham, who was awarded the 2019 A. R. Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics for his paper “House Prices and Consumption: A New Instrumental Variables Approach”. The Bergstrom Prize can be awarded every two years and aims to reward the achievement of excellence in econometrics, as evidenced by a research paper in any area of econometrics.

Fluctuations in house prices are thought to have a significant impact on the macroeconomy, especially through their effect on consumption expenditures. The household balance sheet channel is a commonly cited explanation for this effect, whereby movements in house prices induce wealth effects and changes in the value of collateral. The primary difficulty in trying to identify these effects empirically is that house prices are endogenous equilibrium objects. Instrumental variables strategies are one way to isolate potentially exogenous variation in such prices.

James’ paper assesses the response of household consumption to house prices using a new instrumental variable strategy, which follows the literature on Bartik instruments. These are often referred to as “shift-share”’ instruments, since they typically consist of some aggregate shock that differentially affects locations according to the share of economic activity exposed to that shock.

In the paper, the instrument for local house price growth consists of the local share of houses possessing particular physical characteristics, which is then interacted with regional growth in the marginal prices of those characteristics. The characteristics include features that capture the overall quality of a house, such as its age, number of bedrooms, or number of bathrooms. The intuition for the effectiveness of the instrument is that the more the housing stock in each location is concentrated in particular characteristics, the more exposed that location will be to shocks to the relative prices of those characteristics. For example, if San Francisco was composed mostly of two-bedroom houses built prior to the 1960s, while Las Vegas has mostly four-bedroom houses built in the early 2000s, then a general increase in the price of larger and newer houses would result in relatively faster house price appreciation in Las Vegas.

To conduct the empirical analysis, James uses large micro-data sets on house prices and household consumption. The house price instrument is constructed using data on millions of individual housing transactions from across the US. Because this data contains information on geography, house characteristics, and house prices, it can be used to construct the composition of house characteristics in each location and to run the hedonic house price regressions that are used to estimate the marginal prices of the house characteristics. Household consumption expenditures are taken from a large panel data set which, among other things, contains information on the location of each household. Each household can then be linked to local house price changes in order to estimate the effect of these prices on their consumption behavior.

James reports IV-estimated average consumption elasticities with respect to house prices in the range of 0.1 to 0.15. These estimates correspond to marginal propensities to consume out of housing wealth of approximately 1.2 to 1.8 cents in the dollar, in line with previous estimates in the literature. Another important contribution of the paper is to show that, when estimating consumption elasticities in a panel data setting, the Bartik instrument performs much better than popular alternative instruments in the literature (e.g. local housing supply elasticities). For instance, the instrument provides significant time-series variation in house prices, while other instruments are mostly only useful in the cross-section.

In their assessment, the adjudicators Professors David Fielding, Alfred Haug, and Dorian Owen noted that James’ paper “is an excellent piece of empirical research.  It is well crafted with great attention to detail, using new data on millions of individual housing transactions across the US. The author developed a novel instrument for house prices in order to overcome endogeneity problems when estimating the relationship between household consumption and house prices. The robustness of the empirical findings is convincingly demonstrated.”

Congratulations to recipients of NZAE Conference 2019 prizes

Congratulations to the following recipients of prizes associated with NZAE Conference 2019. More detail on each prize is available at https://nzae.org.nz/prizes/

David Teece Prize in Industrial Organisation and Firm Behaviour Geoffrey Brooke & Lydia Cheung
New Zealand Economic Policy Prize John Creedy, Nazila Alinaghi & Norman Gemmell
NZIER Poster prize – open Sherry Li
NZIER Poster prize – student Sherry Li
People’s Choice Poster Sherry Li
Jan Whitwell Doctoral Hanna Habibi
Jan Whitwell Bachelors / Masters Livvy Mitchell
Seamus Hogan Research Prize Bronwyn Bruce-Brand
Stata Prize for Excellence in Graphics Communications Geoff Cooper & Kabira Namit
Stats NZ Prize Andrea Menclova & Asaad Ali

Call for applications for A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics

NOTE: APPLICATIONS NOW CLOSED.

Applications are now being sought for the A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics, 2019.

The objective of the Prize is to reward the achievement of excellence in econometrics, as demonstrated by a research paper in any area of econometrics. The Prize is open to New Zealand citizens or permanent residents of New Zealand who, on the closing date of applications, have current or recent (i.e. within two years) student status for a higher degree. It is intended that the awardee will utilise the proceeds to assist in financing further study or research in econometrics in New Zealand or overseas.

The Prize can be awarded once every two years, with a value of NZ$1,000 (NB Payment will be to a domestic New Zealand bank account in the name of the prize winner). The selection panel will be appointed by the A R Bergstrom Prize Committee.

Applications/nominations must include:

  • a formal letter of application and, in the case of students, a letter of nomination by their research adviser or chairperson
  • a research paper written by a single author, reporting original research in any area of econometrics
  • a CV and relevant academic transcripts

Applications should be emailed by Friday 15 February 2019 to:
Dr. Leo Krippner ( leo.krippner@rbnz.govt.nz )

See NZAE page for further information on the prize.

Congratulations to recipients of NZAE prizes in 2018

Congratulations to the following recipients of prizes presented at NZAE Conference 2018. More detail on each prize is available at https://nzae.org.nz/prizes/

David Teece Prize in Industrial Organisation and Firm Behaviour Richard Meade
New Zealand Economic Policy Prize Jed Armstrong, Hayden Skilling & Fang Yao
NZIER Poster prize – open Hanna Habibi
NZIER Poster prize – student Hanna Habibi
People’s choice poster Samuel Verevis
Jan Whitwell Doctoral Yaxiong (Sherry) Li
Jan Whitwell Bachelors / Masters Ben Davies
Seamus Hogan Research Prize Sally Owen
Statistics NZ prize Isabelle Bouchard, Lydia Cheung & Gail Pacheco

12th A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics to Daan Steenkamp

Congratulations to Daan Steenkamp, who was awarded the 2017 A. R. Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics for his paper Daan_Steenkamp_dp17-02. The Bergstrom Prize can be awarded every two years and aims to reward the achievement of excellence in econometrics, as evidenced by a research paper in any area of econometrics.

If an asset price contains a ‘bubble’ it will exhibit explosive (i.e. exponential) dynamics. Recently developed tests by Phillips et al. (2015a) and Phillips et al. (2015b) provide an accurate way to gauge whether asset prices are experiencing explosive dynamics, or have done so in the past.

Daan Steenkamp’s paper applies those tests to eleven of the most commonly traded exchange rates at a daily frequency and over a long sample. When measured at a daily frequency, the volatility of exchange rates tends to be high and potentially non-stationary, and there may be a size distortion in the standard tests causing them to over-reject the null that the series is explosive. For this reason, a wild bootstrapping technique is used to compute critical values for statistical interference.

A second contribution of Daan’s paper is to consider the possibility of both positive and negative explosive periods. Currency pairs provide a natural test case in this regard because explosive increases (or collapses) in a foreign currency imply a corresponding collapse (or increase) in the given base currency. Furthermore, the influence of the base currency on the explosive dynamics may be inferred by considering the dynamics of its effective exchange rate, i.e. that currency’s value against a wide basket of foreign currencies.

The results show that bouts of explosiveness in exchange rates against the United States (US) dollar are uncommon at a daily frequency. Periods of explosiveness tend to last for several days but involve only small changes in currency levels. These also usually reverse shortly afterwards.

Second, the dynamics of the US dollar appear to be largely responsible for the results found for the individual currency pairs, as evidenced by a high concordance of their explosiveness with explosiveness in the broad value of the US dollar exchange rate. This result suggests that there are relatively few instances where explosiveness in individual cross-rates reflected country-specific factors. There is also evidence that explosive episodes in currency markets coincide with periods of high market volatility.

In their assessment, the adjudicators Professors Mark Holmes and Bob Reed noted that Daan’s work was “competent analysis based on cutting edge econometric techniques that provide valuable insights.”

Congratulations to recipients of NZAE prizes in 2017

Congratulations to the following recipients of prizes presented at NZAE Conference 2017. More detail on each prize is available at https://nzae.org.nz/prizes/

David Teece Prize in Industrial Organisation and Firm Behaviour Richard Meade
New Zealand Economic Policy Prize Richard Meade
NZIER Poster prize – open Kate Preston
NZIER Poster prize – student Jianhua Duan
People’s choice poster Kate Preston
Jan Whitwell Doctoral Nazila Alinaghi
Jan Whitwell Bachelors / Masters Cameron Hobbs
Seamus Hogan Research Prize Nazila Alinaghi
Statistics NZ prize Richard Fabling and Arthur Grimes

Conference presenters invited to enter for David Teece Prize in Industrial Organisation and Firm Behaviour

The David Teece Prize in Industrial Organisation and Firm Behaviour is a newly-established award made possible through the generous support of the Berkeley Research Group.

The prize will be awarded to the paper presented at the New Zealand Association of Economists annual conference that is deemed to make the best contribution to the study of industrial organisation and/or firm behaviour. Papers need not be applied to New Zealand, but preference will be given to those that demonstrate their results are relevant for New Zealand.

This $2,500 award is sponsored by Berkeley Research Group.

CONDITIONS OF ENTRY

  • Any paper that contributes to industrial organisation and/or firm behaviour may be entered in this competition.
  • Paper submission must meet all of the deadlines for abstract and full paper submission in order to remain eligible.
  • Entrants must be able to attend and present their paper at the NZAE Conference. The presentation may be either an Oral Presentation or Poster Presentation.
  • When submitting the abstract also select entry into this competition through the conference website.
  • It is the written paper that will be judged based on the following criteria: relevance to the fields of industrial organisation and/or firm behaviour; the quality of economic analysis; and relevance to New Zealand.

Congratulations to recipients of NZAE prizes in 2016

Congratulations to the following recipients of prizes presented at NZAE Conference 2016. More detail on each prize is available at https://nzae.org.nz/prizes/

Honours Dissertation Prize Michael Callaghan
New Zealand Economic Policy Prize Sina Mashinchi
NZIER Poster prize – open Andrea Menclova
NZIER Poster prize – student Nazila Alinaghi
People’s choice poster Andrea Menclova
Jan Whitwell Doctoral Yonatan Dinku
Jan Whitwell Doctoral Lan Anh Tong
Jan Whitwell Bachelors / Masters Wilbur Townsend
Seamus Hogan Research Prize Anthony Anyanwu
Statistics NZ prize Lisa Meehan

Students invited to enter for Seamus Hogan Research Prize

The Seamus Hogan Research Prize is a newly-established award to honour the memory of Seamus Hogan (1962-2015). Seamus was President of the New Zealand Association of Economists when he died, after having served several terms on the Association’s Council. Seamus had recently joined the staff of Victoria University of Wellington, and had taught for many years at the University of Canterbury in his native Christchurch. He was highly regarded by his colleagues and students for his teaching, research, and support for the profession and the goals of the Association. It is because of the time and care he took with his many students that the focus of this prize is student research. His obituary can be found in Asymmetric Information, issue 53, August 2015.

The Seamus Hogan Research Prize is awarded for the best public policy paper written by a student and presented at the annual conference. It is for the amount of $1,000.

CONDITIONS OF ENTRY

The prize is for the best paper on a public policy topic written by a student, and it is awarded at the conference. The award is for the written paper, which will be judged according to its clarity of presentation and communication, its critical application of economics to a topic in public policy, and the appropriate selection of empirical and theoretical tools for addressing the policy question at hand.

Entry to the Seamus Hogan Research Prize is open to persons who at the time of the conference are either enrolled in tertiary study in New Zealand or have completed a tertiary degree in New Zealand in the preceding 12 months. There is no residence requirement.

Entrants must be able to attend and present their paper at the NZAE Conference. The presentation may be either an Oral Presentation or Poster Presentation.

Entrants must comply with Conference Registration deadlines as detailed on the conference website.

Co-authored papers are allowed, and the other authors need not meet the eligibility criteria for the award. However, the entrant should have made a substantial contribution to the research.

Authors must comply with all deadlines for submission of Abstracts and Full Papers as detailed on the conference website. Full Papers for the Seamus Hogan Prize may be due before the Conference, to allow sufficient time for judging.

When registering for the conference, please be sure to indicate that you wish to enter the Seamus Hogan Prize.

11th A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics to Michelle Lewis

Congratulations to Michelle Lewis, who was awarded the 2015 A. R. Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics for her paper “Forecasting with Macro-Finance Models: Applications to United States and New Zealand”. The Bergstrom Prize can be awarded every two years (although a three year gap ensued this time) and aims to reward the achievement of excellence in econometrics, as evidenced by a research paper in any area of econometrics.

Michelle Lewis’s Masters Thesis employs macro-finance models, which incorporate macroeconomic and timely financial market data, to forecast macroeconomic variables and the yield curve for New Zealand and the United States. The macro-finance models use the arbitrage-free Nelson-Siegel approach to represent yield curve data with just several components, and those components are combined with the macroeconomic variables of economic activity, inflation, and policy interest rates in a joint vector autoregression to produce forecasts.

The key contribution to the literature is that Michelle’s forecasting analysis is undertaken in a genuine real-time setting. That is, the model estimation and forecasts use the actual macroeconomic data that was available at each historical point in time, which realistically allows for an unavoidable uncertainty faced by practitioners. Conversely, the comparable literature to-date uses quasi-real-time macroeconomic data, which simply truncates the final available macroeconomic data series to estimate the model and produce forecasts over history. While showing promising forecasting benefits from macro-finance models, quasi-real-time analysis is unrealistic because it implicitly assumes that future revisions to historical macroeconomic data are already known at each historical point in time.

Fortunately, Michelle’s results show that, even in real time, there are still substantial forecasting benefits from using macro-finance models. The forecast improvements are most significant and robust for inflation and the policy rate, and economic activity for longer horizons. Furthermore, theoretically motivated restrictions on the yield curve dynamics improve the forecast performance of macroeconomic variables, and the yield curve itself.

However, for economic activity at short-term horizons, the forecasts from macro-finance models do not outperform forecasts from a standard vector autoregression of the macroeconomic variables. This result is at odds with the analogous quasi-real-time analysis, hence illustrating that quasi-real-time analysis can overstate the forecasting benefits of macro-finance models.

In their assessment, the adjudicators Professors Alfred Haug and Les Oxley noted: “The thesis is a substantial piece of empirical research that involved constructing new data and applying sophisticated econometric techniques that were skilfully mastered. Overall, it is an excellent piece of empirical econometrics. The author needs to be congratulated on her achievements.”

10th A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics to Isabelle Sin

Congratulations to Isabelle Sin, who was awarded the 2012 A. R. Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics for her paper “The Gravity of Ideas: How Distance Affects Translations”. The Bergstrom Prize can be awarded every two years and aims to reward the achievement of excellence in econometrics, as evidenced by a research paper in any area of econometrics.

The citation for the award writes that Izi’s paper, elements of which appeared in her PhD dissertation, is “an innovative study of how various measures of distance affect the international transmission of ideas, as one potentially important component underlying growth and development processes.” More information about the prize is available from the New Zealand Association of Economists.

Applications sought for the tenth A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics by 24-Aug-12

Applications are now being sought for the tenth A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics.

The objective of the Prize is to reward the achievement of excellence in econometrics, as evidenced by a research paper in any area of econometrics. The Prize is open to New Zealand citizens or permanent residents of New Zealand who, on the closing date of applications, have current or recent (i.e. within two years) student status for a higher degree. It is intended that the awardee will utilise the proceeds to assist in financing further study or research in econometrics in New Zealand or overseas.

The Prize can be awarded once every two years, with its value currently being $2000. The selection committee will consist of Professors P C B Phillips, V B Hall and their nominees.

Applications/nominations must include:

• a formal letter of application and, in the case of students, a letter of nomination by their research adviser or chairperson

• a research paper written by a single author, reporting original research in any area of econometrics

• a CV and relevant academic transcripts

Applications should be emailed or posted by 24 August 2012, to:

Professor V B Hall
School of Economics and Finance
Victoria University of Wellington
P O Box 600 Wellington
NEW ZEALAND

Email: viv.hall@vuw.ac.nz

The Prize is supported by funds generously provided by the following sponsors:

    Institutional Sponsors

The New Zealand Association of Economists
The School of Business and Economics at the University of Auckland
The Department of Economics at the University of Canterbury
The Faculty of Commerce and Administration at Victoria University of Wellington
Lincoln University
The Economics Group, Commerce Division at Lincoln University

    Personal Sponsors

C R Wymer
A D Brownlie
R J Bowden
H A Fletcher
R H Court
J A & D E A Giles
Anonymous
V B Hall
D M Emanuel
K B Nowman
P C B Phillips

In addition, royalties from the Festschrift Volume Models, Methods and Applications of Econometrics: Essays in Honour of A.R. Bergstrom, P.C.B. Phillips (ed.) Blackwell, Cambridge MA and Oxford UK, 1993, and from A Continuous Time Econometric Model of the United Kingdom with Stochastic Trends, by Albert Rex Bergstrom and Khalid Ben Nowman, Cambridge University Press, 2007, are applied to support the prize.