The 17th Meeting of the New Zealand Econometric Study group (NZESG), 3-4 August 2007, University of Waikato, Hamilton

Mark Holmes with Pian Chen holding the RBNZ-NZESG Award Certificate.

The 17th Meeting of the New Zealand Econometric Study Group (NZESG) was held in Hamilton on 3-4th August 2007. The meeting was hosted by the Department of Economics and the venue was in the main university campus area. The Programme Chair for the Meeting was Mark Holmes (University of Waikato). Taking part were thirty participants from Australia, Finland, Switzerland, Japan, the UK and the USA, as well as representatives from most New Zealand universities, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, MOTU, MED, Statistics New Zealand and the Department of Labour.

This year, the two-day programme included twenty papers presented in six sessions ranging from Applied Microeconomics, Applied Macroeconomics and Forecasting across to Financial Econometrics and Econometric Theory. As usual, the NZESG involved a single stream of presentations. Participants were able to hear and contribute to an impressive set of papers focused on high quality and thought-provoking research. The papers addressed many keen areas of research that included dynamic panel regressions, survey methods, logit and Markov models, while the case studies focused on areas such as horse racing, exporters’ hedging behaviour, bank distress, energy markets and stock market behaviour.

Pian Chen addressing the NZESG having just received the RBNZ-NZESG Award.

A distinctive feature of NZESG meetings has been an emphasis on encouraging, supporting and celebrating the achievements of emerging researchers. This year, eight presenters were eligible for the RBNZ-NZESG Award, which is financially supported by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and awarded on the basis of research presented at the meeting. The Awards Committee comprised Mark Holmes, Chirok Han, John Gibson and Peter Thompson. Each of the eight presentations was judged to be of a very high quality and the award was made to Pian Chen (University of California, Davis) for her paper titled Dimension Reduction Using Inverse Regression and Nonparametric Factors. The certificate was presented to Pian during Saturday afternoon at the close of the NZESG. The Awards Committee also noted the good work by Peter McMenamin (Victoria University of Wellington) for his presentation on Assessing Inflation Targeting in Latin America within a New-Keynesian Macro model.

Participants offered very favourable feedback on the content, structure, organisation and venue of the workshop. On Friday, the NZESG dinner was held in Hamilton Caffe Central (where Professor Scarpa’s brother, Marco, is head chef). This provided participants with the opportunity to unwind after the Friday sessions. Despite the revelries of the Friday night, the attendance for the first session on Saturday morning was impressively high.

The next meeting of NZESG will be held at Auckland University in March 2008.