Entries by Gulnara Nolan

What is the gig economy?

As Motu has noted, the gig economy is an emerging part of the labour market with the features of independent contracting. In the gig economy world, there is little to no cost of switching the job to another is involved. Examples of the gig economy activities include: Uber drivers, YouTube bloggers/ social influencers, independent consultants […]

Tax, cost of capital, and investment

Last time I discussed the relationship between the cost of capital and investment. Given that motivation, the goal of this post is to understand whether investment is responsive to changes in the UCC due to changes in tax settings. This does two things: Provides evidence regarding whether the capital stock will ultimately be influenced by […]

What is the cost of capital and investment link?

In this post I intend to motivate research that is underway by Lynda Sanderson and myself on the investment behaviour of New Zealand firms. [“Taxation, user cost of capital and investment behaviour of NZ firms” forthcoming] The goal of our current research is to understand how changes in tax settings in New Zealand have influenced […]

Do we make choices based on income or prices?

Last time we noted the following regarding thinking about NGDP level targeting: To understand what is going on we need to ask what expectations are being “set”, what is the “target” and how do these reflect what a central bank can “do”? Expectations: We know they can be adaptive (backward looking) or rational (forward looking), […]

How does nominal income targeting work?

Thanks to Dr. Kirdan Lees for prompting me to write today’s post. Today’s topic of discussion is nominal income targeting. What is nominal income targeting?  Nominal income targeting is usually viewed as an alternative monetary strategy to inflation targeting, and has never explicitly been applied in practice by any central bank. However, there is an […]

Randomized control trials and economic models: friends or foes?

Randomized control trial (RTC) studies are getting more and more attention among policymakers in the last few decades. In addition, the RCT is one of the core experimental methodologies used by the recent nobel prize laureates in economics Duflo, Kremer and Banerjee.  Given the excitement around these methods, Chicago University has recently run the IGM […]