Historical experience shows that disruptions in credit markets can have a material impact on activity and inflation. However, it is hard to measure such effects owing to the difficulty in isolating credit supply shocks. This paper employs survey data to identify the impact of credit supply...

Tiering occurs when an institution does not participate directly in the central payment system but instead settles its payments through an agent. A high level of tiering can be a significant issue for payment system regulators because of the increased credit and concentration risk. This paper...

Real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems often incorporate features designed to economise on liquidity. Such 'hybrid features' have the potential to mitigate the systemic impact of operational disruptions of participants. This paper simulates operational disruptions of participants, using data...

Credit is an important macroeconomic variable that helps to drive economic activity and is also dependent on economic activity. This paper estimates a small structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model for Australia to examine the intertwined relationships of credit with other key macroeconomic...

The 2000s was a particularly eventful decade for both the international and Australian economies. There were: two recessions in many countries; the largest international financial crisis since the Great Depression; the ongoing rapid development of Asia; asset booms and busts; and, Australia...

This paper presents a small model of the Australian macroeconomy. The model is empirically based, aggregate in nature and consists of five estimated equations – for non-farm output, the real exchange rate, import prices, unit labour costs and consumer prices. The stylised facts underlying each...

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...

This paper explores the extent to which Knightian uncertainty can explain features of interest rate paths observed in practice that are not generally replicated by models of optimal monetary policy. Interest rates tend to move in a sequence of steps in a given direction, or remain constant for...

We use a simple model of a closed economy to study the recommendations of monetary policy-makers attempting to respond optimally to an asset-price bubble whose stochastic properties they understand. We focus on the impact which the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates has on the...