Australians hold some of the highest levels of mortgage debt in the world. This paper examines what is widely considered to be one of the strongest channels of monetary policy transmission into household spending – the effect of changes in mortgage payments when mortgage rates are linked to the short-term policy rate.

Australian states and territories independently implemented school closures as part of Australia’s successful COVID-19 elimination strategy. In this paper, the authors estimate the causal effect of pandemic school closures on standardised test scores in Australia, using variation in the length of school closures.

This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence on the implications of the timing of reminders by studying the effect of varying the timing of reminder letters to taxpayers on their payment behavior. The collection of unpaid tax debts constitutes a considerable challenge for tax authorities. We show that varying the timing of a reminder letter...

Investigates the relationship between housing wealth and consumption using postcode-level variation in house prices and administrative data on new passenger vehicle registrations as a proxy for consumption.

This paper shows that an economic slump can induce a government to invest in fiscal capacity. Large negative income shocks stress the revenue raising capability of narrow tax bases, making an increase in tax base breadth desirable relative to its fixed implementation cost. A broader tax base enables revenue to be raised at lower tax...