The large recent US current account deficits have been the subject of an enormous amount of study in academia, among government and central bank economists, in business economic reports, and in the press. Many different explanations of the cause of the deficit have been offered, and to varying...

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One of the recurring themes in the literature on financial systems is whether financial integration – that is, openness in the domestic and international financial system – has real, structural economic effects. This paper examines the effect of financial openness on the consumption of...

This paper considers whether capital is a significant constraint on employment in Australia. We calculate the level of capital-constrained employment for ten sectors of the Australian economy. The calculations suggest that the manufacturing; mining; transport, storage and communication and...

The two recently developed Australian indexes of leading indicators have received much attention in the press. Despite this, relatively little is known about their usefulness in forecasting the associated indexes of coincident indicators (i.e., measures of the business cycle) or any activity...

In April 1993, the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision released a series of consultative papers relating to the supervisory treatment of market risk within banks' trading portfolios. The papers proposed a method of allocating capital to cover risk from banks’ trading positions in debt...

This paper provides a survey of ways in which financial innovations may affect the making of monetary policy. This subject has recently become more topical because of both the increased importance of monetary policy and the increasing pace of financial innovation. The analysis makes use of the...

This paper develops an empirically constant, data-coherent, error correction model for inflation in Australia. The level of consumer prices is a mark-up over domestic and import costs, with adjustments for dynamics and relative aggregate demand. We address issues of cointegration, general to...

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This paper discusses the determination of a capital charge to cover default risk on a netted derivatives portfolio. Different methods of setting a capital charge are investigated. Their ability to track a more sophisticated measure of credit risk is tested for Australian banks’ portfolios. The...