We use a variety of techniques to examine the nature and degree of co-movement among Australian state business cycles. Our results indicate that these cycles move closely together, with particularly strong links between the cycles of the larger states. This finding is robust to a range of...

Empirical evidence documents a discernible negative relationship between government size, as measured by income tax rates and the output share of government purchases, and the magnitude of macroeconomic fluctuations in OECD countries since 1960. This implies that both taxes and public spending...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that private consumption is crowded-in by government spending. This outcome violates existing macroeconomic theory, according to which the negative wealth effect brought about by a rise in public expenditure should decrease consumption. In this paper, we...

This paper develops a model which can explain the hump-shaped impulse response of inflation to a monetary shock. A standard New Keynesian (NK) model is augmented so as to include dynamic externality with sticky wages and variable capital utilization. In our analysis, we assume purely...

This paper uses the open economy structural VAR model developed in Buckle, Kim, Kirkham, McLellan and Sharma (2002) to evaluate the impact of monetary policy on New Zealand business cycles and inflation variability and the output/inflation variability trade-off. The model includes a...

Can active Taylor rules (i.e. monetary rules where the nominal interest rate responds more than proportionally to inflation) deliver global equilibrium uniqueness in small open economies? By studying the local and global dynamics of a standard small open economy we point out the misleading...

This paper evaluates monetary policy rules in a business cycle model with staggered prices and wage setting a la Calvo and asymmetric information in the credit market. Rules are compared in a utility based welfare metric, the effects of the model’s nonlinear dynamics are captured by a...

The goal of this paper is to determine the effects of different social security regimes on job search. A less generous pension system induces higher savings across the life cycle and makes agents wealthier and thus more reluctant to accept low wage offers. On the other hand, as the social...

In previous research, I find that a reduction of the cost-of-living adjustment has performed quite well in comparisons among different Social Security reform proposals. While a COLA reduction contains many positive features, there is some concern that it would push the most vulnerable members of...

This paper uses Generational Accounting to assess the fiscal impacts of Korean reunification. Our findings suggest that early reunification will result in a large increase in the fiscal burden for most current and future generations of South Koreans. The Korean reunification’s fiscal...