The pandemic confined the vast majority of us to work from home during the quarantine period. However, there are certain types of occupations such as masseuse and hairdresser that can not be performed from home. Inspired by the recent NBER paper on how many jobs can be done at home, I have calculated rough estimates […]
In my last post I noted that the “supply or demand shock” framing for COVID-19 could be useful, but hid important elements – namely even when there is a real shock if we aren’t noticing rising factor prices (eg wages) there is a demand element. Given current concerns most focus is on the question of […]
In this post I want to have a bit of a brainstorm around the real shock we are facing with COVID-19 in the country. The key idea I wanted to think about was what type of shock this is – a supply shock, demand shock, or both! Note that this is a public health crisis […]
With COVID-19 causing concerns, the RBNZ announced to cut the official cash rate to 0.25% on 16 March. Given this the OCR is at a low level now- leading to open consideration of other potential “unconventional tools” such as Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAP) or more commonly termed as Quantitative Easing. With this now taking […]
With the pandemic news moving quickly Matty convinced me to spend more time on Twitter to keep up with the news (my account is here if you want to follow). I saw some interesting links regarding the economics of COVID-19 which I would like to share and comment on – and I decided to run […]
There is a lot of talk about a 50bp cut by the RBNZ in a couple of weeks due to COVID-19. But what does this mean, and why are we cutting interest rates to battle a bad flu? In this post I am going to discuss the case for interest rate cuts during a natural […]