Over the past decade, household debt (as a share of household income) has reached historically high levels. This has raised concerns about whether, as a result of the rise in debt, households are now more financially 'fragile'.Using household survey data, a logit model is constructed to examine the relationship between the probability of being financially constrained and the economic and demographic characteristics of households in Australia. We find that the probability of a household being constrained is significantly affected by demographic and economic variables such as age, home ownership, weekly household income, and the share of income going to repayments on mortgage debt.Comparing survey results across time, it appears that the overall proportion of households that are financially constrained has fallen or, at worst, remained unchanged between 1994 and 2001. Much of the rise in debt appears to have been due to unconstrained households taking on more debt. As such, the rise in the aggregate debt to income ratio associated with owner-occupier mortgages appears to be the result of voluntary household choice and not to be associated with an increase in household financial distress.

We use data from the Household Expenditure Survey and Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to document facts about consumption and income inequality among households in Australia, emphasising the role of the rents imputed to home owners for conclusions about inequality. Consistent with other developed economies, consumption inequality in Australia is lower on average than income inequality. Both have increased since the early 1990s, with income inequality increasing by more. We decompose the trend in income inequality into four components: (i) changes in observed household characteristics; (ii) changes in the returns to unobserved skills; (iii) changes in the size of persistent income shocks; and (iv) changes in the size of transitory income shocks. We find that changes in the size of persistent and transitory income shocks, rather than changes in observed household characteristics, explain most of this trend. Since the middle of the 2000s, the source of income inequality has shifted from transitory to persistent factors, which is consistent with the rise in consumption inequality over the corresponding period. We find that accounting for imputed rents lowers estimates of the level of inequality in Australia, but has a negligible effect on the trends.

The effect of monetary policy on housing prices varies significantly across local housing markets. This heterogeneity across local housing markets can be partly explained by variation in housing supply conditions—housing prices are typically more sensitive to changes in interest rates in areas where land is more expensive. The fact that housing prices in more expensive areas are more sensitive to changes in interest rates than in cheaper areas indicates that lower (higher) interest rates increase (decrease) housing wealth inequality. However, the effects of monetary policy on housing wealth inequality appear to be temporary. Other factors also explain the variation in sensitivity to monetary policy across local housing markets with the sensitivity being greater in areas in which incomes are relatively high, households are more indebted and there are more housing investors. This suggests that the sensitivity of housing prices to monetary policy is state dependent.

Economists have long been interested in the effect of business sentiment on economic activity. Using text analysis, I construct a new company-level indicator of sentiment based on the net balance of positive and negative words in Australian company disclosures. I find that company-level investment is very sensitive to changes in this corporate sentiment indicator, even controlling for fundamentals, such as Tobin's Q and expected profits, as well as controlling for measures of company-level uncertainty. I explore the mechanisms that link investment to sentiment. The conditional relationship could be because sentiment proxies for private information held by managers about the future prospects of the company or because of animal spirits among managers relative to investors. I find that the effect of sentiment on investment is relatively persistent, which is consistent with the private information story, albeit less persistent than other news shocks, such as Tobin's Q. But the effect of sentiment on investment is not any stronger at 'opaque' companies in which managers are likely to be better informed than investors, which argues against the private information story. Corporate investment has been weak in Australia since the global financial crisis (GFC) and demand-side factors, such as lower sales growth, explain more than half of this persistent weakness. Low sentiment and heightened uncertainty weighed on investment during the GFC but have been less important factors since then.

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