Economic Record最新文献

A dynamic long-run general equilibrium framework based on a structural vector error correction model is used to study the factors determining the structural transformation of the Australian economy from 1960 to 2020. Three sets of shocks are identified: demand shocks through aggregate consumption, supply shocks caused by changes in relative prices across industries, and shocks arising from deviations between observed and long-run industry employment shares. The empirical results highlight the importance of all shocks in causing the structural transformation of the Australian economy across industries and over time. The results are found to be robust to a range of sensitivity experiments.

We investigate the cumulative government spending multiplier in times of tight and loose monetary policy for New Zealand. Using local projections with instrumental variables, we find the spending multiplier peaks at 0.61 under loose monetary policy, while remaining statistically insignificant when monetary policy is tight. Splitting government spending into two components leads to different results. The government consumption multiplier does not depend on the stance of monetary policy and peaks at 0.55. However, the government investment multiplier peaks at 0.84 when monetary policy is loose, but is not statistically significant when it is tight.

We study the labour market effects of bushfires and floods within Australia over the past two decades, focusing on gender as a determinant of vulnerability. Whilst floods unambiguously increased the labour supply of both genders (creating around 13,500 jobs per year), the likelihood of female employment is particularly vulnerable to bushfires, falling by 1.6 percentage points (or around 5,000 jobs per year). This effect is partially explained by industry sector, with bushfires lifting overall male employment through industries including mining and transport, while reducing more female-dominated services sector participation. We also examine intrahousehold dynamics, finding strong evidence for an ‘added worker’ effect.

Using the Reserve Bank of Australia's MARTIN model, we compare actual monetary policy decisions with a counterfactual in which the cash rate is set according to an optimal simple rule. We find that monetary policy played a crucial role in avoiding a potential recession in 2001 and mitigating the downturn in 2008–09. By contrast we find that the cash rate was too high during 2016–19, keeping inflation below the Reserve Bank's target band. Optimal monetary policy in 2016–19 would have involved a substantially lower cash rate and produced significantly better employment outcomes.

We study the educational outcomes of the 1974–75 Bangladesh famine among early life survivors using the 1991 Bangladesh micro-census data. We find that famine adversely affected survivor children in areas that experienced higher rice prices relative to labour wages. However, children living in wealthy households in famine-stricken areas escaped the adverse effects and had similar educational outcomes as those with no famine exposure. We also find that, surprisingly, exposure to a double catastrophe (i.e., concurrent famine and flood) in early life had weaker effects on survivor children's education than exposure to a single catastrophe. We show that disaster-alleviation mechanisms were more effective in districts affected by double disasters.