In the past decade or so there has been a substantial rise in the indebtedness and debt-servicing obligations of Australian households. This has been accompanied by a trend increase in labour force participation (LFP) for women and more recently for men. Microeconomic data show a clear positive...

Under the direction of the Asian Consultative Council of the BIS at its February 2019 meeting, the BIS Representative Office for Asia and the Pacific set up a Working Group of regional central banks to examine their policy frameworks, focusing on capital flows, exchange rates, and the joint use...

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...

Inflation expectations have wide-reaching effects on the macroeconomy and are an important part of the transmission of monetary policy. This paper analyses the Melbourne Institute survey of householders’ inflation expectations. Householders’ average inflation expectations vary with personal...

This paper investigates household saving behaviour in Australia, as well as the drivers behind the recent rise in the aggregate household saving ratio. Our results explaining differences in saving behaviour across households are consistent with theory and previous findings. As might be expected,...

The Reserve Bank of Australia's third Survey of Consumers' Use of Payment Methods was conducted in November 2013. The survey used a diary and end-of-survey questionnaire to collect data on the use of cash, cards and a range of other payment methods, both at the point of sale and via remote...

One of the recurring themes in the literature on financial systems is whether financial integration – that is, openness in the domestic and international financial system – has real, structural economic effects. This paper examines the effect of financial openness on the consumption of...

This paper studies the macroeconomic consequences of ageing in an overlapping-generations model with endogenous retirement. We study the behaviour of the economy when population ageing is driven by movements in fertility, changes in longevity, and a combination of both. To gauge the economic...