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...

Whether people form their expectations of the future in a model-consistent or extrapolative manner, has implications for the way the economy and monetary policy are modelled. The first half of this paper provides three pieces of information about inflation expectations – that survey measures...

The decline in output volatility in a number of countries over the past few decades has been well-documented, though less agreement has been reached about the causes of this decline. In this paper, we use a panel of data from 20 OECD countries to see if there is a role for various indicators of...

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...

In practice, monetary policy changes tend to produce a smooth path for interest rates while the path of policy interest rates generated by models is often considerably more variable. This paper investigates whether the inclusion of uncertainty can help reconcile the theory to the practice. It...

This paper attempts to discern from financial market data the impact of greater monetary policy transparency over the period since the late 1980s. We examine whether interest rate variability has changed, the degree to which financial markets anticipate policy moves and movements in the yield...

This paper examines whether it costs more to own a home or to rent. We argue this is a useful criterion for assessing housing overvaluation. We use a new Australian dataset, which includes prices and rents for matched properties, letting us value housing in levels. We find that if real house...

A home is the single largest purchase that most households make, and it is one that usually requires some debt financing. Because housing debt is such a large component of households’ balance sheets, it is important to understand the financing decision. In this paper, we use household level...

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...