The output gap is of central interest to policymakers. Being unobservable, however, its estimation is prone to error, particularly in real time. Errors result from revisions to the data and unavoidable end-point problems associated with the econometric techniques used to estimate it. This is the...

Quarterly national accounts data are amongst the most important and eagerly awaited economic information available, with estimates of recent growth regarded as a key summary indicator of the current health of the Australian economy. Official estimates of quarterly output are, however, subject to...

This paper tests the response of bond yield spreads and equity prices to credit rating changes in the Australian financial market. Unlike some earlier studies for foreign markets, we find evidence that both yield spreads and equity prices move in the ‘expected’ direction following rating...

This paper uses data for Australia, the United States, Japan and the euro area to examine the relative performance of the headline CPI, exclusion-based ‘cores’, and trimmed means as measures of underlying inflation. Overall, we find that trimmed means tend to outperform headline and...

This paper constructs coincident indices of Australian economic activity using techniques for estimating approximate factor models with many series, using data that begin in the early 1960s. The resulting monthly and quarterly indices both provide plausible measures of the Australian business...