The long-running debate about the role of monetary policy in responding to rising asset prices has received renewed attention in the wake of the global financial crisis.This paper contributes to this debate by describing the Australian experience of a cycle in house prices and credit from 2002...

The trend rise in import penetration in Australia has renewed interest in the determinants of import volumes. In this paper, an attempt is made to explain the growth in Australia’s imports in terms of the increased openness of the economy. Openness is proxied by the effective rate of...

This paper documents the clear change of view, which has taken place in Australia over the past three decades or so, concerning the relevance of the current account deficit for policy. Historical experience under a fixed exchange rate regime suggested that large persistent deficits were...

In this paper we develop a theoretical framework that helps to analyse the role of monetary policy in responding to asset-price bubbles. A large and rapid fall in the nominal price of assets that form the basis of collateral for loans from financial intermediaries can have adverse effects on...

This paper examines exchange rate pass-through for the prices of both imports and manufactured exports. It is found that, in the long run, exchange rate pass-through over the docks is complete for both classes of good. However, in the short run, responses to currency movements differ...

This paper investigates the merits of aggregate inflation targeting compared with non-traded inflation targeting using a model of a small open economy producing traded and non-traded goods. An important innovation of our approach is that we isolate the effects of exchange rate, supply and demand...

This paper explores the effects of product and labour market regulation on growth in total factor productivity (TFP) using panel data from 1974–2003 for 18 OECD countries. Our regressions are specified so that labour and product market regulations can affect productivity both individually and...

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...

This paper demonstrates that the response of the current account to shocks depends on the degree of persistence of these shocks. This result is in accordance with standard intertemporal models that incorporate both consumption smoothing and an investment response to shocks. The estimation...

The depression of the 1890s in Australia was associated with the collapse of the banking system, whereas problems in the financial system during the 1930s depression were far less severe. This is despite the fact that the initial macroeconomic shock during the 1930s depression was at least as...