Martin Berka

I am a Professor of Macroeconomics at the School of Economics and Finance, Massey University, and a director of the New Zealand Centre for Macroeconomics. My primary research interests lie in international finance, open economy macroeconomics, and monetary economics.

I also serve as the founding director of the Open Economy Macroeconomics Research Programme at Centre of Applied Macroeconomic Analysis (CAMA) at the Australian National University, an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Surveys and New Zealand Economic Papers, an executive officer of the Central Bank Research Association, a Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Financial and Economic Research, an occasional member of the External Economic Forecast Panel at the New Zealand Treasury, a fellow of the Slovak Economic Association, a board member of the Australasian Macroeconomics Society, and a research associate at the Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

In the past, I have served as an Academic Fellow of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, a programme organizer of the ABFER conference and the Southern Workshop in Macroeconomics (VUW Macro Workshop in the past). I was an organizer of RBNZ 2013 December Macro conference and a local organizer of NBER EASE 2013 in Wellington.

*** NEW: the Inaugural AUSTRALASIAN CONFERENCE ON INTERNATIONAL MACROECONOMICS ***

C.V.

Publications

Real exchange rates and sectoral productivity in the Eurozone (with Michael B. Devereux and Charles Engel), the American Economic Review 108(6), 2018 (also NBER WP 20510). See replication material.

Basle Accord and Financial Intermediation: The Impact of Policy, Review, Vol 2 (100), (with Christian Zimmermann), 2018.

Trends in European Real Exchange Rates (with Michael B. Devereux), Economic Policy Vol. 28(74), 2013 (lead article). Working paper (longer) version, slides, and data.

Real exchange rate adjustment in and out of the Eurozone (with Michael B. Devereux and Charles Engel), American Economic Review (Papers & Proceedings) 102(3), 2012

International Risk-sharing and commodity prices (with Mario J. Crucini and Chih-Wei Wang), Canadian Journal of Economics, Vol 45 (2), 2012 (Working paper version here)

The Consumption Terms of Trade and Commodity Prices (with Mario J. Crucini), published in Commodity Prices and Markets, NBER book series published by University of Chicago Press (eds. Ito and Rose), February 2011 (NBER WP 15580 here)

Non-linear Adjustment in International Prices and Physical Characteristics of Goods, published in Review of International Economics, Vol 17 (1), 2009.

Funding of regions in New Zealand, published in Clm. Economia, No. 6, 2006

Working papers

General Equilibrium Model of Arbitrage Trade and Real Exchange Rate Persistence

Deviations in real exchange rates across OECD economies and their structural determinants (with Daan Steenkamp). Also an ABFER WP 19029. The current version is here.

Price setting in a leading Swiss online supermarket (with Michael B. Devereux and Thomas Rudolph, first draft (NBER WP 17126))

Credit Crunch as an Optimal Decision of Risk-Averse Banks under Uncertainty

Purchasing Power Parity Puzzle as a Trade Phenomenon (Ph.D. thesis)

Comments and Reviews

BIS Research Paper No. 82b, Comment on: Cross-border portfolios: assets, liabilities and wealth transfers in Cross-border financial linkages: challenges for monetary policy and financial stability, October 2015

Book review: Ethics, Economics and Politics: Principles of Public Policy, 2002 in Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 16(3), April 2005

Recent Teaching

Econ 413 - International economics: monetary

Econ 305 - Advanced macroeconomics

Econ 202 - Intermediate Macroeconomics

Concordances between

• • 6-digit IO codes and 4-digit US SIC 1987 codes. Constructed for translating 6-digit US Input-Output tables for years 1971, 1977, 1982, 1987 and 1992 into SIC 87. The second column denotes a weight (assumed equal across all SIC industries in a particular row).

  • 4-digit US SIC 1987 codes and 4-digit ISIC (rev. 3) codes. Same, aggregated to 2-digits.

  • 4-digit ISIC (rev. 3) codes and 5-digit SITC (rev. 3) codes. Same, aggregated into 2-digit ISIC (rev.3) and 2-digit SITC (rev.3)

Note: second column denotes a weight (assumed equal across all industries in a particular row

Restructuring the Banking Sector in Slovakia (M.A. thesis), with defense notes (all you really need to know, encrypted)

Some recent conference discussions:

• • Discussion of Benefits of Labor Mobility in a Currency Union by Christopher House, Christian Proebsting, and Linda Tesar (at ABFER 2018 in Singapore)

  • Discussion of Measuring the stance of monetary policy in conventional and unconventional environments by Leo Krippner (at NBER EASE in Tokyo)

  • Discussion of Policy Regime Change against Chronic Deflation? Policy Option under a Long- term Liquidity Trap by Fujiwara, Nakazono and Ueda (at NBER EASE in Tokyo)

  • Discussion of Global Value Chains and Effective Exchange Rates by Patel, Wang and Wei (at ABFER in Singapore)

  • Discussion of Finance at Center Stage: Lessons from Euro Crisis by Maurice Obstfeld (at NBER EASE in Wellington)

  • Discussion of Identifying the Valuation Effects and Agency Costs of Corporate Diversification: Evidence from the Geographic Diversification of U.S. Banks by Martin Goetz, Luc Laeven, and Ross Levine (at ABFER in Singapore)

  • Discussion of Manufacturing-Finance Comparative Advantage and Global Imbalances by Rui Mao and Yang Yao (at ABFER in Singapore)

  • Discussion of Declining Labor Shares and the Global Rise of Savings Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman (at NBER EASE 2012 in Taipei)

  • Discussion of Payroll Tax and Household Consumption by Chongen Bai and Binzhen Wu (at NBER EASE 2011 in Beijing)

  • Discussion of Financial Choice in a Non-Ricardian Model of Trade by Katheryn N. Russ and Diego Valderrama (at the Second conference of Microeconomic Foundations of real exchange rate analysis, Vanderbilt University)

Research reports and theses of some of the students I supervised:

• • Price differences and agricultural food market integration in Sub-Saharan Africa by Brooke Treadgold

  • European real exchange rate and total factor productivity: an empirical study by Erin Wilson

  • Is globalization operating to reduce inflation: Evidence from 6 OECD countries by Menghan Cai

  • The economic relationship between trade and immigration in New Zealand by Mingming Qian

  • Explaining exchange rate pass-through to different Asian countries by Xuemei Xiang

  • Explaining exchange rate pass-through in different prices by using VAR model in European countries by Fangfang Liang

  • Exchange rate pass-through to import prices across industries in New Zealand by Hanshi Lin

  • Explaining the persistence of Aus-NZ real exchange rate deviations across industries by Jinhui Zhang

Media

• • Brief radio interview on the Chinese economy (Jan 2016. - an.mp3 file)

Other

New Economics Papers in Open Economy Macroeconomics

RePEc - Research Papers in Economics, the largest database of econ literature, free of charge.

Massey University / School of Economics and Finance

"A perfection of means and a confusion of aims seems to be our main problem" - Albert Einstein (other quotes)

A writeup for a UBC VOC Journal about a trip across the Tasman. And one that UBC Trek magazine wrote about the row. A tiez pre SME.