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Promoting well-informed and reasoned debate on public policy issues that matter to New Zealanders. 
Environment

Review of policy instruments for freshwater management

Authors: Sophie O'Brien | Julia Talbot-Jones | Suzie Greenhalgh

Working Paper

As pressures on water resources increase in New Zealand, so does the need for alternative policy approaches that can adequately address the demands of competing interests.

Productivity & innovation

Living on the edge: An anatomy of New Zealand’s most productive firms

Author: Richard Fabling

Working Paper

We investigate the characteristics and performance of New Zealand’s frontier firms from 2005 to 2018, using the rich microdata in the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). This paper draws on the labour and productivity datasets available...

Updates

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2020-12-04

Many challenges hinder Māori to realise their aspirations for native forestry on their land.

High costs and restrictive governance are just some of the roadblocks that stop Māori landowners from establishing native forestry on...

2020-11-20

How could economic policy incentivise better freshwater outcomes?

Issues around the health of our rivers and lakes are front of mind for many New Zealanders at this time....

2020-10-06

What is the nature of subjective wellbeing inequality?

A common wellbeing approach that is used in public policy places emphasis on how people subjectively value their own life...

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Motu Research Round Table

14 October 2020

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

A prominent economist and influential professor (The John and Natty McArthur University professor at Harvard), Rebecca is one of the world’s most articulate, insightful and persuasive scholars focused on driving large-scale change.

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Recent events

14 September 2020

Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers and Policies

Alistair Dieppe from the World Bank presentation on his recent paper which presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the impact of COVID-19 on productivity, and presents a wide-range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth.

14 August 2020

Thoughts on Climate change in a post Covid world

Suzi Kerr is the Chief Economist at Environmental Defense Fund. She was, until May 2019, a Senior Fellow, and from 1998 - 2009 Founding Director, at Motu Research in New Zealand.

13 April 2020

Exploring Preconditions for Effective Global Responses to Climate Change

When Jeremy Webb started his research, he was looking for options that might help solve climate change. He quickly realised the problem wasn’t a lack of options and shifted focus to exploring who would implement those options and under what conditions. Jeremy has developed an insightful approach to framing scenarios in which the world succeeds or fails at addressing climate change and related impacts.

Featured work

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Productivity & innovation

Living on the edge: An anatomy of New Zealand’s most productive firms

Author: Richard Fabling

Working Paper

We investigate the characteristics and performance of New Zealand’s frontier firms from 2005 to 2018, using the rich microdata in the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). This paper draws on the labour and productivity datasets available...
Population & labour

The career paths and employment transitions of Early Childhood Education workers

Authors: Dean Hyslop | Trinh Le

Note

This research note analyses the career paths and labour market outcomes of the early childhood education (ECE) workforce.
Climate change mitigation

Challenges and opportunities with native forestry on Māori land

Authors: Sophie O'Brien | Pia Pohatu | Leo Mercer

Working Paper

A new research paper by Motu Economic and Public Policy Research explores the decision-making processes of Māori landowners. It looks at the extent to which land-use decision-making processes such as funding programmes and afforestation incentives...
Environment

A Growing Problem: Exploring Livestock Farm Resilience to Droughts in Unit Record Data

Authors: Levente Timar | Eyal Apatov

Working Paper

In one of the first studies of its kind, a new paper by Motu Research investigates the impact of droughts on livestock farm enterprises by linking financial, agricultural and productivity data with historical weather...
Environment

Review of policy instruments for freshwater management

Authors: Sophie O'Brien | Julia Talbot-Jones | Suzie Greenhalgh

Working Paper

As pressures on water resources increase in New Zealand, so does the need for alternative policy approaches that can adequately address the demands of competing interests.
Climate change mitigation

Decision trees: Forestry in the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme post-2020

Authors: Arthur Grimes | Catherine Leining | Sandra Cortés-Acosta

Working Paper

Changes to the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS) in June 2020 create incentives for landowners to establish new forests and register them in the NZ ETS as either standard or permanent forestry.From 1...
Productivity & innovation

Research Funding and Collaboration

Authors: Adam Jaffe | Ben Davies | Jason Gush | Shaun C. Hendy

Article

We analyse whether research funding contests promote co-authorship. Our analysis combines Scopus publication records with data on applications to the Marsden Fund, the premiere source of funding for basic research in New Zealand. On average,...
Wellbeing & macro-economics

The Relationship Between Subjective Wellbeing and Subjective Wellbeing Inequality: Taking Ordinality and Skewness Seriously

Authors: Arthur Grimes | Florencia Tranquilli | Stephen Jenkins

Working Paper

We examine the relationship between SWB inequality and individual SWB outcomes across countries and across time.
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