Economic Record最新文献

This study uses stated preference experiments to examine labour market preferences of 309 workers retrenched by the Australian automotive industry for non-pecuniary job attributes denoting job quality and meaningfulness. We find that autonomy and employer reputation for good work policies and practices are the two most important non-pecuniary job attributes, with compensating wage differentials of roughly $5 per hour for greater autonomy and better employer reputation. Job security and skill utilisation are also important, but less so, with compensating wage differentials between $1 and $3 per hour for greater security and fewer training requirements. Workers' strongest preference is not for a particular type of work, but rather for a particular type of employer, suggesting that labour market policy might pay more attention to regulating the quality of workplaces.

We present a simple model to characterise central bank forward guidance, large-scale asset purchases and yield curve control. Endogenous yield curve reactions to policy shocks are a key determinant of monetary conditions and can support or offset policy intentions. Alternative monetary policy tools allow the central bank to signal central bank private information to investors when the policy rate is at the effective lower bound, shaping yield curve reactions. Commitments to these tools offer policy certainty but can become time-inconsistent if the economy recovers sooner than expected. If commitments become time-inconsistent, endogenous yield curve tightening can offset excess stimulus. The strength of this offset, and the optimality of monetary conditions, improves with the precision of investor inferences of central bank private information.

Despite a conventional wisdom that female board members positively impact firm performance, a thorough examination of the research to date reveals no consensus that female board members have either a positive or negative effect on firm financial performance. We build the largest dataset of Australian board appointments assembled to date. We use our data to demonstrate how difficult it is to replicate existing research, with one example from Australia and one from the USA. Using event studies and regression analyses, we demonstrate that there is little evidence that female board representation affects firm financial performance.

This paper examines the effect of the 2008 financial crisis on Taiwan's fertility by exploiting a natural experiment in which public-sector workers are unaffected due to job security. The financial crisis reduces the number of children by increasing the first-birth interval, which leads to a lower probability of first birth. Women aged 33–38 experienced the largest decline in the probability of first birth, increasing the risks of permanent childlessness. Low-income households and those with less-educated spouses have a greater increase in the first-birth interval. The number of children and the probability of first birth remain significantly lower 9 years after 2008.

Australian Federation in 1901 entailed the formation of a customs union among its formerly tariff-autonomous colonies. Although the elimination of tariff barriers to intercolonial/interstate trade would have been welfare-enhancing, Australia's common external tariff was set considerably higher than the tariffs on external goods imported by the pre-Federation colonies, implying a welfare reduction. Using a dataset of 3,584 commodity- and colony-disaggregated imports, this paper estimates trade restrictiveness indices and welfare losses for the Australian colonies and Commonwealth. Despite the high external tariff post Federation, the customs union produced a net static welfare gain conservatively estimated to have been 0.17 per cent of GDP.

We identify monetary policy shocks in New Zealand as 1-day changes in the whole yield curve around monetary policy announcements. The impacts of these shocks on inflation and output are estimated using functional local projections. We find that the effects of monetary policy shocks are standard in the short run but might be different in the long run. Monetary policy shocks in a small open economy have similar effects as in a large economy, except that unconventional monetary policy announcements have limited impact on long-term interest rates. Accounting for forward guidance, used in New Zealand since 1997, is important.