This paper deals with the identification of, and explanations for, co-movement in regional business cycles using data for Australian states and territories (regions). We show that both raw growth rates and the deviations from a Hodrick-Prescott trend reflect noise in the series as well as any...

It is important to understand how labour markets in different regions are affected by ‘common’ or ‘national’ shocks including national macroeconomic, monetary and fiscal policies. This paper applies a new econometric approach - involving an unobserved components model - to identify the...

In this paper we develop a framework which is appropriate for the systematic investigation of the relationship between net (and gross) flows between different labour market states and movements in the unemployment rate. We use that framework to investigate the behaviour of net flows of persons...

This paper explores the following question - Has there been any long-run increase (or decrease) in the ‘incidence’ of long-term unemployment once we have corrected for cyclical factors? Our research leads us to conclude: (i) that the incidence of male long-term unemployment has been neither...

Along with a number of other central banks around the world the Reserve Bank of Australia has quite explicitly adopted an inflation target. Both the Bank and the Australian Government’s statistical agency (the Australian Bureau of Statistics) report various measures of the underlying rate of...

There is a considerable body of evidence showing that it is the inflow into unemployment that drives the unemployment rate up and down and so from a policy point of view an important question is whether or not movements in state inflow reflect the impact of state-specific shocks or common shocks...

In this paper we examine Australian data on national and regional employment numbers, focusing in particular on whether there have been common national and regional changes in the volatility of employment. A subsidiary objective is to assess whether the results derived from traditional growth...

The paper seeks to 'explain' certain stylised facts in relation to flows into and out of Unemployment and especiaIly to identify the 'proximate' determinants of the amplitude and the frequency of fluctuations in the Unemployment Rate over the course of the business cycle. Since the evolution of...

In this paper we examine the volatility of aggregate output and employment in Australia with the aid of a frequency filtering method (the Butterworth filter) that allows each time series to be decomposed into trend, cycle and noise components. This analysis is compared with more traditional...

This paper examines the manner in which labour services are modelled in the aggregate production function, concentrating on the relationship between numbers employed and average hours worked. It argues that numbers employed and hours worked are not perfect substitutes and that conventional...