We use past forecast errors to construct confidence intervals and other estimates of uncertainty around the Reserve Bank of Australia's forecasts of key macroeconomic variables. Our estimates suggest that uncertainty about forecasts is high. We find that the RBA's forecasts have substantial...

Indices of business and consumer sentiment receive widespread media coverage and are closely watched by market economists despite their limited success as leading indicators. In this paper we ask what explains ‘sentiment’ and find that lagged economic indicators (such as changes in GDP, job...

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...

We estimate inflation expectations and inflation risk premia using inflation forecasts from Consensus Economics and Australian inflation-indexed bond price data. Inflation-indexed bond prices are assumed to be non-linear functions of latent factors, which we model via an affine term structure...

In a model where the risk premium on long-term debt is, in part, endogenously determined, we study two kinds of unconventional monetary policy: long-term nominal interest rates as operating instruments of monetary policy and announcements about the future path of the short-term rate. We find...

This paper studies two types of interest rate rules that involve long-term nominal interest rates in the context of a New Keynesian model. The first type considers the possibility of adding longer-term rates to the list of variables the central bank reacts to in setting its short-term rate. The...

Monetary policy is conducted in an environment of uncertainty. This paper sets up a model where the central bank uses real-time data from the bond market together with standard macroeconomic indicators to estimate the current state of the economy more efficiently, while taking into account that...

In earlier work (Fuhrer 1997a), I document what I view as the failure of standard models of representative consumer and firm behaviour to replicate the dynamics that we observe in the aggregate data. In essence, these models fail because they imply that both inflation and real variables must...

We use data on coupon-bearing Australian Government bonds and overnight indexed swap (OIS) rates to estimate risk-free zero-coupon yield and forward curves for Australia from 1992 to 2007. These curves, and analysts’ forecasts of future interest rates, are then used to fit an affine term...

More than two decades have passed since the initial relaxation of domestic interest rate controls in Australia and just over one decade since the float of the Australian dollar. Interest rates and exchange rates now constitute two of the most important channels through which macroeconomic policy...