The key finding in this paper is that financial conditions provide useful information about downside risks to GDP and employment growth, and upside risks to the unemployment rate. That is, when financial conditions are extremely restrictive, the risks of very bad outcomes for these variables increase.

This paper studies the role of collateral in credit markets under stress.

In times of crisis, real-time indicators of economic activity are a critical input to timely and well-targeted policy responses. The authors of this paper have developed a ‘news sentiment index’ that measures the net balance of words expressing positive and negative sentiment used by journalists in news articles about the economy. This indicator can be...

In response to the sharp fall in economic activity in the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Australian government announced a series of measures to support incomes and employment. The largest was the JobKeeper payment - a wage subsidy to help keep employees and firms connected. In this paper, the authors explore what effect...

The 2019 Consumer Payments Survey (CPS) showed that Australians are continuing to switch to electronic payment methods in preference to cash for their day-to-day transactions. More recently, the switch to electronic payment methods is likely to have accelerated as a result of consumer and merchant responses to COVID-19.