The 1980s witnessed large increases in corporate debt and sustained asset price inflation. More recently, asset prices, particularly commercial property prices, have fallen significantly. The effect of these changes on balance sheets, and their implications for the business cycle, have generated...

Financial deregulation in the 1980s saw the lifting of regulations on interest rates charged by banks. In general, lending rates now respond more quickly to changes in banks’ cost of funds than they did in the regulated period. However, lending rates still do not always move one for one with...

Major changes to the Australian financial system occurred in the 1980s that were potentially important for the effects of monetary policy on economic activity. Using vector autoregressive econometric techniques we find that, in fact, the deregulation of the financial system has made very little...

Currency counterfeiting is costly for society. Law enforcement agencies allocate substantial resources to deter, detect and prosecute counterfeiting operations, households and businesses suffer a direct loss to counterfeiters and undertake costly prevention measures, and central banks spend...

Australian financial institutions remained healthy throughout the global financial crisis and their deposits were guaranteed by the Federal Government. Nevertheless, demand for currency increased abnormally quickly in late 2008, resulting in an additional $5 billion (or 12 per cent) of...

In this paper we investigate the degree of competition in the market for housing loans by examining a new data set, the asset composition of individual banks. We construct a Herfindahl index of concentration in this market, and estimate a model of conjectural variations to examine the reactions...