Several recent papers have explored the possibility that inflation-targeting central banks in small open economies pay too much attention to exchange rate fluctuations; changing short-term interest rates in response to fluctuations that have transient effects on inflation could be...

Quarterly national accounts data are amongst the most important and eagerly awaited economic information available, with estimates of recent growth regarded as a key summary indicator of the current health of the Australian economy. Official estimates of quarterly output are, however, subject to...

Inflation rates across countries tend to exhibit a degree of co-movement. In this paper we use a panel vector autoregression (panel VAR) model to investigate possible explanations of this co-movement for the G7 economies. Shocks to commodity prices are found to be more important than common...

Policy-makers have recently noted an apparent flattening of the Phillips curve. The implications of such a change include that a positive output gap would be less inflationary, but the cost of reducing inflation, once established, would increase. This paper’s objective is to review the...

This paper attempts to reconcile the high estimates of price stickiness from macroeconomic estimates of a New-Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) with the lower values obtained from surveys of firms’ pricing behaviour. This microeconomic evidence also suggests that the frequency with which firms...

In this paper we develop a theoretical framework that helps to analyse the role of monetary policy in responding to asset-price bubbles. A large and rapid fall in the nominal price of assets that form the basis of collateral for loans from financial intermediaries can have adverse effects on...

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...

Almost a decade ago David Gruen and Geoff Shuetrim constructed a small macroeconomic model of the Australian economy. A comprehensive description of this model was subsequently provided by Beechey <em>et al</em> (2000). Since that time, however, the model has continued to evolve. This paper provides an...

The Phillips curve has generally been estimated in a linear framework. This paper investigates the possibility that the Phillips curve is indeed a curve, and shows that a convex short-run Phillips curve may be a more accurate representation of reality than the traditionally used linear...

Ball and Sheridan (forthcoming) show that OECD countries with a history of high inflation before the 1990s have subsequently experienced a larger degree of disinflation than countries with a history of low inflation. They label this process ‘regression to the mean’, and argue that it...