Australian Economic Review最新文献

The slope of the Phillips curve has been shown to be flatter in recent years, including in Australia. How does this impact the optimal targeting window for a central bank conducting an average inflation targeting policy? This article shows that, in the face of the flattening of the Phillips curve, it is desirable to increase the targeting window. Doing so would lead to lower inflation fluctuations and to a non-trivial welfare gain. In a persistently higher-than-target inflation, high-interest-rate environment, this implies that the central bank should keep the nominal interest rate higher for longer.

Australia, like many other countries, experienced an unexpected surge in inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic. This has renewed interest in the Phillips curve because of its important implications for monetary policy. We estimate the price Phillips curve in the post-inflation targeting period using the most recent state-level data. Identification relies on variation in regional demand that policymakers do not aim to stabilize. After controlling for cost-push shocks and equilibrium unemployment, we obtain a modest slope of the Phillips curve and, more importantly, we do not find any steepening of the Phillips curve in the post-COVID period. Without correct identification, the post-COVID Phillips curve would be steeper as documented for other countries including the United States. We also find that the slope gradually decreases with the level of unemployment.

Recent decades have seen substantial increases in wealth inequality; this is particularly troubling given the high persistence of this inequality across generations. Yet, we have surprisingly little understanding of how and why wealth is transmitted across generations. Is this persistence driven by innate biological differences across families? Or is it driven by growing up in a different environment with access to different opportunities? In the 2024 Downing Public Lecture, Professor Sandra E. Black discusses the economics research that tries to answer this question, focusing on how one can disentangle the role of nature versus nurture.

In this article, I argue that shifts in the natural rate of interest provide important insights for the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC). The deviation of the real interest rate from the natural interest rate (interest rate gap) captures the monetary policy stance, which is important for the dynamics of inflation and the output gap in the wake of persistent and permanent variation in the natural rate of interest. I present the evolution of the estimates of the Taylor-rule consistent- natural interest rate, and thus the associated path of the expectations of future inflation via the Fisherian relationship. The path of these two variables has implications for estimation of the NKPC.

As part of an ongoing review of Australia's Competition and Consumer Act (CCA) by Treasury, consideration is being given to removing the exemption from that law for conduct related to the labour market. This article considers whether there is sufficient justification to do so and, if so, how such conduct should be assessed under the CCA. No-poach agreements are cartel conduct and other restrictive agreements may substantially lessen competition in labour markets. Nevertheless, in some circumstances there are legitimate reasons for some of these arrangements. Some suggestions are made as to how restrictive labour arrangements could be addressed by competition law.

Following the methodology of Beck et al. in 2001 and Levine in 2002, three relative indicators are constructed to measure China's financial structure at the provincial level and these indicators are applied to explore the current financial structure–economic growth nexus in the Chinese context. The ordinary panel regression model results indicate that different dimensions of financial structure have different growth implications, while the panel threshold regression model results suggest a nonlinear relationship between financial structure and economic growth based on the stage of economic development, the relative importance of the state sector, and the financial structure per se.

We analyse household telecommunications spending in Australia over the period 2006–2021 using Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey data. We find the affordability of telecommunications is improving, and that telecommunications spending behaves like other core necessities, such as food. We find households in which members are not employed, have relatively low education, are elderly, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders or immigrants, speak English poorly, reside alone, or have long-term health conditions are at heightened risk of digital exclusion due to lower spending on telecommunications. Households located in rural areas, with children or with members that work from home are at higher risk of digital exclusion as a consequence of overspending on telecommunications. Overall, the number of people at risk of digital exclusion from inadequate spending or overspending is quite small in Australia. The risks appear to have decreased during COVID-19. Telecommunications is a core necessity but given the small number of people at risk of exclusion, policies addressing affordability should be highly targeted.

Since computer code has become elemental in current research it has become imperative that code should be written clearly and in good style. A program written in a clear, well-written style is easier to debug and is more useful to those who may want to replicate your work, extend it, speed it up or borrow from it. Clearly, written code is also a useful tool in the training of future researchers. In this paper, we suggest a set of style guidelines and we provide examples of how particular elements of code can be done using the statistical packages Stata, SAS and R. We also present recommendations for how to write code.