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...

This paper examines the choice of a monetary policy rule in a simple macroeconomic model. In a closed economy, the optimal policy is a ‘Taylor rule’ in which the interest rate depends on output and inflation. In an open economy, the optimal rule changes in two ways. First, the policy...

In an open economy inflation-targeting framework, whether policy-makers should target aggregate or non-traded inflation depends on the structural relationships in the economy. This paper shows that in a small empirical model of the Australian economy, it makes little difference which measure is...

Inflation targeting has been criticised for being ‘inflation only’ targeting and hence, for ignoring output and employment. This paper argues that this criticism is misplaced. The inflation-targeting framework has sufficient flexibility to allow for the short-run trade-off between output and...

We use a structural vector autoregression model to characterise the aggregate and industry effects of exchange rate movements on the Australian economy. We find that a temporary 10 per cent appreciation of the real exchange rate that is unrelated to the terms of trade or interest rate...

The Australian economy has proven resilient to sizable exchange rate fluctuations over the post-float period. In part this can be attributed to financial institutions and non-financial firms learning to adapt to swings in the Australian dollar. This has included the increased use of financial...

Standard trade theory suggests that internationalisation of an economy should lead to increased competitive pressures and an improvement in the efficiency with which domestic goods are produced and priced. We examine a number of ways in which the pricing behaviour of the Australian manufacturing...

Expectations of the future play a key role in the transmission of monetary policy. Over recent years, a lot of theoretical and applied macroeconomic research has been based on the assumption of rational expectations. However, estimated models based on this assumption typically fail to capture...

This paper investigates the merits of aggregate inflation targeting compared with non-traded inflation targeting using a model of a small open economy producing traded and non-traded goods. An important innovation of our approach is that we isolate the effects of exchange rate, supply and demand...

This paper examines the sources of Australia’s business cycle fluctuations. The cyclical component of GDP is extracted using the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition and a structural VAR model is identified using robust sign restrictions derived from a small open economy model. In contrast to...