By international and historical standards, Australia does not appear to be under-capitalised. Nevertheless, the past decade has seen a clear reversal of the steady upward trend in capital intensity; this reversal was most marked after the short-lived increase in capital spending associated with...

The cost of capital is the minimum rate of return that an investment project must earn in order to cover its funding costs and any tax liabilities. Australian studies on this subject have produced a wide range of estimates. This paper demonstrates that a wide range of outcomes can result from...

Automated teller machine (ATM) networks are a key component of payments systems. A number of competing theoretical models have been developed to examine fees associated with ATM transactions. A common feature of these models is that they imply that the elimination of interchange fees will cause...

Historical experience shows that disruptions in credit markets can have a material impact on activity and inflation. However, it is hard to measure such effects owing to the difficulty in isolating credit supply shocks. This paper employs survey data to identify the impact of credit supply...

We examine how the structure of Australian production and trade has been affected by the expansion of global production networks. As conventional measures of international trade do not fully capture the impact of global supply chains, we present complementary estimates of value-added trade for...

This paper estimates the effects of the mining boom in Australia, using a large-scale structural macroeconometric model, AUS-M. We estimate that the mining boom boosted real per capita household disposable income by 13 per cent by 2013. The boom has contributed to a large appreciation of the...

We use state-space methods to construct new estimates of Australian gross domestic product (GDP) growth from the published national accounts estimates of expenditure, income and production. Across a range of specifications, our measures are substantially less volatile than headline GDP growth....

We use a structural vector autoregression model to characterise the aggregate and industry effects of exchange rate movements on the Australian economy. We find that a temporary 10 per cent appreciation of the real exchange rate that is unrelated to the terms of trade or interest rate...

This paper draws on a survey of consumers' willingness to pay surcharges to use debit cards and credit cards, rather than cash. Just as the price a consumer is willing to pay for a good or service is indicative of the value he/she places on that item, the willingness to pay a surcharge to use a...