Wages growth in Australia was lower than expected prior to COVID-19 based on historical determinants. One possible explanation for this is that employment had become more concentrated among a small number of large employers. This reduced outside options for workers and lowered their bargaining...

This paper uses an event study approach to estimate the impact of children on the gender earnings gap in Australia. We use the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to show the arrival of children has a large and persistent impact on the gender earnings gap, reducing...

The Australian economy is constantly affected by technological, demand and policy shocks from home and abroad. The opportunities and challenges presented by these shocks create demand for government advice on the likely effects on households, firms and the Australian economy, and in turn...

To meet the needs of a broad set of internal and external stakeholders now and into the future the Australian Treasury maintains a significant macroeconomic modelling capability. Treasury's current inhouse capability is similar to that of the US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint...

We estimate the employment effects of the first 6 months of the JobKeeper program over the following year, which includes the height of the COVID-19 recession in Australia and subsequent rapid recovery. The design of the program allows us to use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design -...

This report estimates the "social rate of time preference" (SRTP) for New Zealand public policy appraisal using a Ramsey equation. It uses the Weitzman (1998) method to derive a declining discount rate schedule of 2% (real) for years 1-30, 1.5% for years 31-100, and 1% for years 101 on. The...

This report estimates the "social rate of time preference" (SRTP) for New Zealand public policy appraisal using a Ramsey equation. It uses the Weitzman (1998) method to derive a declining discount rate schedule of 2% (real) for years 1-30, 1.5% for years 31-100, and 1% for years 101 on. The...

A feature of the recent global slowdown in productivity growth is that progress at the technological frontier has remained strong, while the gap between firms at the global frontier and other 'laggards' within an industry has grown. This growing gap reflects the fact that laggard firms now seem...

Automatic stabilisers are fiscal policy's first line of defence in the face of adverse economic shocks. Automatic stabilisers capture fiscal policy's automatic countercyclical response to the state of the business cycle, and are determined by factors like the progressivity of the tax system, the...

Fiscal multipliers provide a way of quantifying the GDP gain for a given (discretionary) fiscal policy intervention. I compute government consumption multipliers for New Zealand, in normal times and when monetary policy is constrained at the effective lower bound, using an estimated...