Economic Record最新文献

The Economic Record is a leading scholarly journal in economics, with a particular focus on issues of national and international policy relevance. Established in 1925, the journal has played a central role in advancing economic research in Australia and beyond. To commemorate its 100th anniversary in 2025, this study provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of its publication and citation landscape. Drawing on all publications indexed in the Scopus database (1925–2024) and the Web of Science Core Collection (1966–2024), this paper examines highly cited documents, prolific authors, institutions and countries of origin, and evolving research themes. A suite of bibliometric techniques including co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and keyword co-occurrence was employed using VOSviewer and bibliometrix. The findings highlight the journal's deep and evolving contributions to fields such as labour economics, macroeconomic modelling, and public policy, with particularly strong participation from institutions in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The journal's growth and global engagement over recent decades underscore its status as a vital platform for applied economic research.

This paper investigates the extent to which ‘women's work’ – that is, work that societal norms assign to women – is systematically undervalued in the economy. Analysis of 2021 data for Australia detects that average hourly wage rates are 9.9 per cent lower in female-concentrated occupations compared with male-concentrated occupations, and 3.8 per cent lower in female-concentrated industries compared with male-concentrated industries. Looking at unpaid work that is invisible in national accounts, analysis of time use data finds that 55 per cent of women's labour contribution to the economy is in the form of unpaid work and care, compared with 31 per cent of men's. Adding unpaid work and care to paid work, and adjusting for the undervaluation of female-concentrated jobs and the male wage premium, sees women's share of total labour input expand from 36.8 per cent to 50.5 per cent. These findings are informative across a range of practical applications, including equitable wage settings, the division of household assets, and measurements of productivity. The relegation of this topic of inquiry as a specialist ‘feminist issue’ constitutes a structural gender bias within the economics discipline: ‘women's work’ needs to be fully recognised and valued as a core component of the economy.

Economic historians have identified Victoria's McCulloch Tariff of 1866 as the genesis of Australian protection of manufacturing—a trade-policy regime that was to persist until the late-twentieth century. The McCulloch Tariff imposed 10 per cent duties on a range of manufactured imports; this range was further extended by the closely following Customs Act of 1867. Victoria's pathbreaking protectionist legislation of 1866–1867 has, until now, escaped any direct cliometric assessment of its consequences. This article relies on what little industry-specific data are available for Victoria in this period: annual data on the number of manufactories in operation in the years preceding and following the policy change. Following a difference-in-differences approach, this study finds no statistically significant association between the imposition of the 10 per cent duties and the number of manufactories. This finding is irrespective of changes in the regression sample, definition of an untreated industry, and estimation method used. The McCulloch Tariff is better remembered for the trajectory on which it placed Victorian economic policy.

We introduce new firm-level indices covering input costs, demand and final prices based on firms' earnings calls. These are constructed using a powerful large language model (LLM). We show that our new LLM-based indices are superior to those based on detailed lists of keywords. The new indices have a leading relationship with conceptually similar indices from popular business surveys, as well as related official statistics, such as consumer price inflation, demonstrating that they are relevant for assessing current economic conditions. Next, we use our indices to examine various aspects of firms' price-setting behaviour. The reduced-form associations we estimate indicate that price-setting behaviour depends on the source of the shocks firms face (demand or cost-driven), the direction of the shock (with firms reacting more to cost increases relative to decreases) and which industries are most affected. This underscores the importance of continuing to develop rich multisector models of the economy to better understand firms' reactions to different types of shocks.