We use past forecast errors to construct confidence intervals around Australian Government Budget forecasts of key economic and fiscal variables. These confidence intervals provide an indication of the extent of uncertainty around the point estimate forecasts presented in the Budget.

Treasury’s forecasting framework has evolved over the past 21 years from the outlook for a single financial year to the outlook for the Australian economy 40 years ahead for intergenerational analysis. A constant through this evolution has been the sharp distinction between the methodologies...

In 2009 the Australian government delivered $8 billion in direct payments to households. These payments were pre-announced and randomly allocated over a 5-week period. We exploit this random allocation to estimate the causal response of households consumption expenditures. While we don't find a...

We examine the relationship between oil price windfalls and labor market regulation empirically through panel regressions in a sample of 83 countries spanning 1970-2014. We find that oil price windfall gains lead to a deregulation of the labor market in autocracies but have no effects in...

Do populations grow as countries become richer? In this paper we estimate the effects on population growth of shocks to national income that are plausibly exogenous and unlikely to be driven by technological change. For a panel of over 139 countries spanning the period 1960-2007 we interact...

We examine the effects that variations in the international food prices have on democracy and intra-state conflict using panel data for over 120 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main finding is that in Low Income Countries increases in the international food prices lead to a...

I examine the relationship between democracy and the perceived risk of corruption in a panel of 130 countries. My panel model controls for country fixed effects and enables the estimation of a within-country relationship between democracy and corruption. My main finding is that democracy...

I estimate the effect that growth in countries' GDP per capita has on the growth rate of infrastructure. In order to extract exogenous variation in GDP per capita growth, I use the growth of the international oil price multiplied with countries' GDP shares of oil net-exports as an instrumental...