Changes in standard hours of work, as occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, alter the budget constraint facing employers and their employment decisions. Using quarterly data for the period 1969:1-2004:1, an employment equation for Australia that includes standard hours as well as the usual output,...

A time-varying Phillips Curve was estimated as a means to examine the changing nature of the relationship between wage inflation and the unemployment rate in Australia. The implied time-varying equilibrium unemployment rate was generated and the analysis showed the important role played by...

A number of measures of the underlying rate of inflation are reported for Australia. We formulate criteria that an acceptable underlying rate must satisfy and then test to see whether any of the current measures satisfy these criteria. We find that for the period since inflation targeting began,...

In this paper we deal with five related questions. What are the 'stylised facts'about the behaviour of flows into and out of unemployment and the Unemployment Rate in Australia, especially in recessions? Why does the number of persons flowing out of Unemployment (including the number flowing...

In this paper, we examine the volatility of aggregate output and employment in Australia with the aid of a frequency filtering method. This analysis is compared with more traditional methods based on the examination of first differences in the logs of the raw data. We show that the application...