The purpose of this paper is to use a large data set comprising individual’s responses to survey questions about future economic conditions, unemployment and prices to explore lay people’s models of the economy and specifically their understanding of the relationship between unemployment and...

In this paper we look at the way in which the ABS derives gross flows data from successive Labour Force Surveys. The procedure used by the ABS is described and a measure of the 'matching rate' obtained. We develop a simple theoretical model designed to explore the relationship between the Labour...

A time-varying Phillips curve was estimated as a means to examine the changing nature of the relationship between wage inflation and the unemployment rate in Australia. The implied time-varying equilibrium unemployment rate was generated and the analysis showed the important role played by...

The Lorenz curve relates the cumulative proportion of income to the cumulative proportion of population. When a particular functional form of the Lorenz curve is specified it is typically estimated by linear or nonlinear least squares, estimation techniques that have good properties when the...

The conventional formula for estimating the extended Gini coefficient is a covariance formula provided by Lerman and Yitzhaki (1989). We suggest an alternative estimator obtained by approximating the Lorenz curve by a series of linear segments. In a Monte Carlo experiment designed to assess the...