Eric Crampton is Chief Economist with the New Zealand Initiative.
He applies an economist’s lens to a broad range of policy areas, from devolution and housing policy to student loans and environmental policy. He served on Minister Twyford’s Urban Land Markets Research Group and on Minister Bishop’s Housing Economic Advisory Group.
Most recently, he has been looking at devolution to First Nations in Canada.
He is a regular columnist with Stuff and with Newsroom; his economic and policy commentary appears across most media outlets. He can also be found on Twitter at @ericcrampton.
Phone: +64 4 499 0790
Worried about President Trump? It might not be as bad as you think. Read more
Earlier this year I wrote that a Donald Trump presidency wouldn’t be that bad. Today I’m a whole lot less cheerful. Read more
Head of Research Dr Eric Crampton discusses inequality and poverty in New Zealand following the release of our report, The Inequality Paradox: Why inequality matters even though it has barely changed. Read more
When I was a poor grad student, I made a lot of use of credit cards. Not having to pay for up to about 40 days after a purchase was awfully helpful when budgeting around lumpy scholarship payments. Read more
Economist Eric Crampton is appalled by the suggestion that there be any government money put into Joseph Parker's next fight. He joins the panel to express his digust on the matter. Read more
Thomas Hobbes told us the State is necessary to protect us. The war of all against all that would ensue without a State to protect us from each other would be worse than even a terrible despot. Read more
New Zealand maintained its third place ranking in this year’s Economic Freedom of the World reports, but it’s hardly a place allowing markets in everything. And that can be costly. Read more
Last month, we launched a report on the government’s interest-free student loan policy. To summarise briefly, the scheme has had no particular benefits in improving access to tertiary study, but has been rather costly both for the government and for the tertiary sector. Read more
Did the Canadian experiment work? It is far too early to tell, and anybody claiming otherwise may be trying to sell you something, writes Eric Crampton There’s a reasonable consensus that not building enough houses, apartments, or terraced housing is at the root of Auckland’s lack-of-homes problem. Read more
A couple of months ago, I was part of a panel discussion on the future of tertiary education, hosted by the Tertiary Education Union. It wanted a forecast of the future of skills in a world of technological change: what should universities be teaching to prepare students for the world ahead? Read more
Right now, you probably have homeowner’s insurance that, if a catastrophe happened, would let you build a new house providing similar functionality to your current house, up to a specified total cost. Here’s the deal. Read more
2016 is closer to 1240 than you might think. In 1240, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, established the first ever documented student loan system. Read more
Our Head of Research, Dr Eric Crampton, talks to Newstalk ZB about our latest report, Signal Loss: what we know about school performance. Read more
The train-wreck was utterly predictable but we should still look back to see how it happened, how bad it was, and how we can keep it from happening again. This week, The New Zealand Initiative released its decade-on retrospective look at the government’s interest-free student loan policy. Read more