Economic Papers最新文献

Over the last quinquennium, low wage growth has been a distinguishing feature of the Australian economy preventing the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) to achieve its inflation target. Notwithstanding the current record low cash rate, wage growth remains low. This paper casts doubts about the economic logic of the RBA in relation to the behaviour of wages. We argue that an unlimited supply of labour leads to a vertical Phillips curve in the short-run, and therefore, significant wage growth cannot be expected to happen irrespective of how low the cash rate is.

In this paper, we review studies to understand how much households change their electricity consumption when there is a price change. Many studies find residential households have long-term and short-run elasticities behaving as economic theory would suggest. Long-run elasticities range from −0.75 to −0.3, and short-run elasticities range from −0.47 to −0.026. Household responsiveness seems to increase when paired with technology. The major gaps in research from the empirical economic literature are how low-income and vulnerable Australian households could be affected by price changes and how Australians respond to within-day variation in prices.

We utilise principal component analysis to determine whether a (small) set of factors can explain cryptocurrency returns and whether this varies over time. We find that a substantial proportion of cryptocurrency return variation is explained by a single principal component that is highly correlated with bitcoin returns. The explanatory power of this factor is greatest for larger cryptocurrencies and increases markedly in the most recent part of the sample. Our results have implications for investors determining optimal portfolio decisions and for policy-makers wary of systemic risk.

The agrarian policy changes introduced in Cuba since 2007 have resulted in notable changes in land tenure. This has contributed to a shift to annual crops, substantial reductions in idle land and the partial (but still insufficient) recovery of non-sugar agricultural output and yields. Despite these limited advances, the long-term growth and development of Cuban agriculture requires more profound structural reforms. The experiences of China and Vietnam suggest that the (further) expansion of land tenure and property rights should be a logical first step to achieve this goal.

This paper estimates the trade creation and trade diversion effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) using a panel data set of 77 countries for the period 1989–2016. We found that the formation of NAFTA has resulted in both import trade creation and diversion. However, the magnitude of trade creation is higher than that of trade diversion. On the sectoral level, trade creation and diversion occur in both agricultural and non-agricultural imports, with trade creation exhibiting a higher magnitude. The magnitude of trade creation and diversion is found to be the highest for agricultural imports, which are followed by total and non-agricultural imports, respectively.

Consistent evaluation procedures would be necessary to assess correctly the impacts of sport and cultural events, in particular large events. This paper reviews methodological issues in CBA of sport and cultural events based on what appears as the first attempt to provide guidelines for such analysis: the Framework used by New South Wales Treasury. This framework actually deals with most of the questions that an analyst would have to consider on this issue. Based on this document, we propose various possible amendments, which mostly relate to a fuller consideration of opportunity costs, displacement and other General Equilibrium effects. Many of the methodological issues investigated may have an important impact on the analysis results.

Using a time series cross-state panel data of 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (DC) over the period of 1959 through 2015, this article intends to assess the direct and indirect effects of contractionary monetary policy shocks on income inequality through interest rate and consumer price index (CPI) inflation channels. To address this, the authors examine two possible linear and non-linear relationships between inflation and income inequality and between gross domestic product (GDP) and income inequality. Using various measures of income inequality, the results of the pooled model and the individual fixed effect model show that CPI inflation positively and interest rate negatively affect all measures of income inequality in linear regression. The results confirm the existence of the non-linearity relationship between inflation and income inequality as well as the Kuznets inverted “U-shaped” hypothesis between GDP and income inequality. The results of linear and non-linear regressions show that the DC and the state of Ohio are better off and worse off than the state of Alabama as baseline of models, respectively. The impulse response functions (IRFs) for the individual panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) models show that income inequality could be reduced by implementing contractionary monetary policy through interest rate channel in the short run and increased persistently pursuing contractionary monetary policies via inflation channel in the long run.

This paper estimates a block recursive VAR to evaluate the relative impacts of US and Chinese GDP growth shocks on Australia's growth, controlling for the impacts of these shocks on growth in three of Australia's other major trading partners. For the sample 1984–2016, shocks to US GDP growth have a larger impact on Australian GDP growth than do shocks to Chinese GDP growth. In rolling windows through the sample, the impact of Chinese GDP shocks on Australia's growth increases substantially. For the sub-sample 2000–2016, shocks to United States and Chinese GDP growth impact Australian GDP growth by the same magnitude.

The Superannuation Guarantee Levy (SGL) is scheduled to be increased from 2025, and there is evidence that an increase could be offset against wages. This paper uses a dynamic model to estimate the distribution of the impact of the SGL increase on both pre- and post-retirement standards of living. The paper shows the increase in the SGL rate has the potential to reduce current consumption for the mean household below the “first level of financial stress” (derived from ABS (6530) Table 11.4) whilst only marginally increasing post-retirement consumption. The SGL increase may not be an acceptable trade-off between current consumption and retirement savings.

Economic theory predicts that pricing electricity to better-reflect the costs imposed by peak demand will benefit consumers by deferring network capacity augmentation. To date, the Australian Capital Territory is one of the first Australian jurisdictions to see significant uptake rates of more cost-reflective network electricity tariffs by small consumers. This paper identifies lessons learned from the implementation of these tariffs, suggesting consumers have responded to price signals, thereby improving network utilisation. It also finds that the uptake of cost-reflective tariffs is considerably greater under an opt-out tariff assignment policy, and consultation plays an important role in gaining community support.