Australian Economic Review

Publisher:: Wiley
Publication date:: 2021-02-01

ISBN:: 0004-9018

Issue Number

Latest documents

Surveying Lifelong Learning in the German National Educational Panel Study
This article outlines the German National Educational Panel Study, which collects comprehensive data on lifelong learning in a multi‐cohort sequence design, covering early childhood, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and adulthood. It outlines data collection for all the cohorts and educational phases across the life course whilst focusing on the educational stage ‘Adult Education and Lifelong Learning’. Data can be accessed for academic purposes as scientific use files under data contract.
Issue Information
Does Monetary Policy Respond to Uncertainty? Evidence from Australia
We construct a novel measure of uncertainty using expert monetary policy recommendation data for Australia. Our results suggest that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) tends to lower the cash rate when expert uncertainty is high. This result is robust to using other uncertainty measures.
Introduction
Optimal Monetary Policy in China with Money as Not Redundant
This article provides three pieces of evidence to show that money is not redundant in China: aggregate real money balance can affect aggregate demand even when its effect through short‐term interest rates is controlled. I estimate a DSGE model using Chinese data. With the estimated model, I find that monetary policy that controls the money supply (the quantity rule) is better than the one that controls the short‐term interest rate (the price rule) in terms of minimising welfare loss. I then discuss the optimal monetary policy that combines both the price rule and the quantity rule.
The Influence of Climate on Migration
This paper provides an overview of research into the phenomenon of whether climatic factors, such as temperature and weather‐related disasters, affect the decision to migrate. As an example, we examine migration flows from 198 countries to Australia for the time span from 1980 to 2015. Our results show that temperature does not have a robust, significant effect on migration flows, while weather‐related disasters do significantly affect flows to Australia.
Measuring Uncertainty for New Zealand Using Data‐Rich Approach
This paper develops two state‐of‐the‐art uncertainty indices for New Zealand by exploiting two separate data‐rich environments. The first index follows the methodology outlined in Jurado, Ludvigson and Ng (2015) to construct an estimate of uncertainty based on a large New Zealand macro dataset. The second index is constructed based on freely accessible and real time Google Trends data to provide a real‐time and freely‐accessible measure of uncertainty as in Castelnuovo and Tran (2017) and Shields and Tran (2018). Both indices do a reasonable job measuring uncertainty in New Zealand. VAR evidence documents significant impacts of uncertainty shocks on GDP in New Zealand.
Tracing the Sources of South Australian Economic Slumps
This article quantitatively investigates economic fluctuations in South Australia from 1990–2014. In particular, the study applies the business cycle accounting method to decompose the economic fluctuations into their sources. The main findings suggest that the low efficiency wedge was the primary source of South Australian economic slumps. Moreover, it is shown that infrastructural and R&D expenditures are important factors in explaining the variation of the efficiency wedge. This conforms with the fact that the South Australian Government is keen to support its development through the economic stimulus plan. Trade openness may also be a contributor.
Teaching Public Economics with Special Reference to Australian and US Cultures
This article discusses how teaching public economics is, and should be, related to national cultures. The article shows how the US culture of distrust of government influences the two major US texts (Rosen and Gayer 2014; Gruber 2016) that dominate the teaching of public economics in Australia and elsewhere. By contrast, Stiglitz and Rosengard's (2015) text on public economics emphasises the role of government in providing social welfare. These traditions may be described as neo‐liberal and social democratic respectively. I conclude that the social democratic approach reflects Australian culture and is more appropriate for teaching public economics in Australian universities.
Yield Curve and Financial Uncertainty: Evidence Based on US Data
How do short‐ and long‐term interest rates respond to a jump in financial uncertainty? We address this question by conducting a local projections analysis with US monthly data, period: 1962–2018. The state‐of‐the‐art financial uncertainty measure proposed by Ludvigson, Ma and Ng (2019) is found to predict movements in interest rates at different maturities. In particular, an increase in financial uncertainty is found to trigger a negative and significant response of both short‐ and long‐term interest rates. The response of the short end of the yield curve (i.e., of short‐term interest rates) is found to be stronger than that of the long end (i.e., of long‐term ones). In other words, a financial uncertainty shock causes a temporary steepening of the yield curve. This result is consistent, among other interpretations, with medium‐term expectations of a recovery in real activity after a financial uncertainty shock.