Quarterly national accounts data are amongst the most important and eagerly awaited economic information available, with estimates of recent growth regarded as a key summary indicator of the current health of the Australian economy. Official estimates of quarterly output are, however, subject to...

We use a simple model of a closed economy to study the recommendations of monetary policy-makers attempting to respond optimally to an asset-price bubble whose stochastic properties they understand. We focus on the impact which the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates has on the...

We present a simple model of the macroeconomy that includes a role for an asset-price bubble, and derive optimal monetary policy settings for two policy-makers. The first policy-maker, a sceptic, does not attempt to forecast the future possible paths for the asset-price bubble when setting...

The output gap – the difference between actual and potential output – is widely regarded as a useful guide to future inflationary pressures, as well as an important indicator of the state of the economy in its own right. Since the output gap is unobservable, however, its estimation is prone...

Analysts typically use a variety of techniques to forecast inflation. These include both ‘bottom-up’ approaches, for near-term forecasting, as well as econometric methods (such as mark-up models of inflation, which have been found to perform quite well for Australia – see de Brouwer and...

This paper is the second of two companion pieces. In the first we developed a model of competition between payment systems which extends that of Chakravorti and Roson (2006). Here we turn to the results which can be obtained from the Chakravorti and Roson model, from our extension of it, and...

This paper is the first of two companion pieces examining competition between payment systems. Here we develop a model of competing platforms which generalises that considered by Chakravorti and Roson (2006). In particular, our model allows for fully endogenous multi-homing on both the merchant...