Over the past decade, household debt (as a share of household income) has reached historically high levels. This has raised concerns about whether, as a result of the rise in debt, households are now more financially ‘fragile’. Using data from the 1998/99 Household Expenditure Survey (HES),...

We examine how the structure of Australian production and trade has been affected by the expansion of global production networks. As conventional measures of international trade do not fully capture the impact of global supply chains, we present complementary estimates of value-added trade for...

This paper examines the factors that drive corporate investment in Australia using a panel of listed companies covering the period from 1990 to 2004. Real sales growth is found to be a significant determinant of corporate investment. The user cost of capital, which incorporates both debt and...

We document some new stylised facts about how Australian homeowners value their homes using household panel data and unit-record data on home sale prices. We find that homeowners' price beliefs are unbiased at the postcode level, on average, although there is considerable dispersion in the...

There is extensive anecdotal evidence to suggest that a significant tightening in credit conditions, or a 'credit crunch', occurred in the United States following the collapse of the loan securitisation market in 2007. However, there has been surprisingly little formal testing for the existence...

A sharp decline in inventory investment was an important contributor to the economic slowdown in Australia in 2008/09. I identify the extent to which this was due to a tightening in short-term credit constraints. In an experimental design setting, I identify the causal effect of short-term...

We investigate the factors associated with the incidence of mortgage-related financial difficulties in Australia. We use two complementary micro-level datasets: loan-level data on residential mortgages from two Australian banks, which we use to analyse the factors associated with entering 90+...

In this paper we estimate the effect of particular price incentives on consumer payment patterns using transaction-level data. We find that participation in a loyalty program and access to an interest-free period, both of which lower the price of credit card use, tend to increase credit card use...

Indices of business and consumer sentiment receive widespread media coverage and are closely watched by market economists despite their limited success as leading indicators. In this paper we ask what explains ‘sentiment’ and find that lagged economic indicators (such as changes in GDP, job...

This paper considers whether capital is a significant constraint on employment in Australia. We calculate the level of capital-constrained employment for ten sectors of the Australian economy. The calculations suggest that the manufacturing; mining; transport, storage and communication and...