This paper presents a new measure of underlying inflation: component-smoothed inflation. It approaches the problem of determining underlying inflation from a different direction than previous methods. Rather than excluding or trimming out volatile CPI items, it smoothes components of the CPI...

This paper constructs coincident indices of Australian economic activity using techniques for estimating approximate factor models with many series, using data that begin in the early 1960s. The resulting monthly and quarterly indices both provide plausible measures of the Australian business...

This paper demonstrates that factor-based forecasts for key Australian macroeconomic series can outperform standard time-series benchmarks. In practice, however, the advantages of using large panels of data to construct the factors typically comes at the cost of using less timely series, thereby...