Essays in economics and econometrics

Abstract

The body of this thesis consists of three published papers written while enrolled in a PhD; in addition, two published papers completed while enrolled in a Master of Economics are included in an appendix. Of the five papers, four are largely empirical in nature, with the subject matter reflecting my (and my employer the Reserve Bank of Australia’s) interest in areas relevant to policy-making institutions in Australia. The findings of this body of work can be summarised as follows: housing wealth effects in Australia arise from an easing of collateral constrains and a common association between rising house prices and another factor such as rising income expectations, rather than through ‘traditional wealth effects’; the rise in Australian household saving over the 2000s appears to have been driven by a reduction in permanent income expectations following the financial crisis and a desire to pay down debt and rebuild assets; negative credit‐supply shocks explain one-third to one-half of the fall in credit growth seen over the financial crisis, and around one-sixth of the fall in GDP growth, and so played an important but not dominant role in economic outcomes over the period; and much of the quarter-to-quarter volatility in Australian GDP data appears due to measurement error. The fifth paper is very different — it is a theoretical econometrics paper with little obvious application to policy-making. The paper is nonetheless a contribution to the literature in that it makes available via construction a new class of highly flexible (in terms of both permissible marginal distribution and permissible correlation structure) non-Gaussian random field, for possible use in economic and/or financial modelling.