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...

Structural change has been conjectured to lead to an upward bias in the estimated forward expectations coefficient in New-Keynesian Phillips curves. We present a simple New-Keynesian model that enables us to assess this proposition. In particular, we investigate the issue of upward bias in the...

Standard solution methods for linearised models with rational expectations take the structural parameters to be constant. These solutions are fundamental for likelihood-based estimation of such models. Regime changes, such as those associated with either changed rules for economic policy or...