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...

This paper examines the effect of inflation on productivity growth in Australia. Broad historical correlations suggest a negative relationship between inflation and aggregate productivity growth. The low-frequency nature of the relationship, however, means it is difficult to establish...

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...

This paper presents a new measure of underlying inflation: component-smoothed inflation. It approaches the problem of determining underlying inflation from a different direction than previous methods. Rather than excluding or trimming out volatile CPI items, it smoothes components of the CPI...

This paper investigates the gains from the use of information technology in Australia during the 1990s using a growth accounting framework. We make use of new industry-level estimates of the productive capital stock. Our analysis suggests that Australia has done well out of the ‘new...

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),...

There has been a large decline in the volatility of Australian output over the past 40 years. This paper looks at the causes of this decline. Accounting for part of the change have been substantial changes in the inventories cycle. Abstracting from changes in the inventories cycle there have...

This paper applies the methodology of Markov-switching models to describe the inflation process in Australia in the period since the early 1960s. In contrast to conventional modelling, the approach makes explicit allowance for the possibility of structural change: inflation is modelled within a...