Economic Papers最新文献

As the issue of agricultural household economic well-being begins to resurface, we use custom data sets to compare the financial position of agricultural households to the general Australian population. We find that agricultural households tend to have higher levels of wealth compared to households in the average Australian population, yet experience more income volatility on average. Our study brings attention to the important well-being issue while also highlighting the need to collect robust farm household data in order to better understand the complex dynamics of household well-being in the Australian agricultural sector.

This paper reviews the literature on the perceived individual-level demand-side barriers to and benefits from seeking and following financial advice. Our review reveals that poor financial literacy, lack of trust and financial adviser anxiety have all been found to dissuade individuals from pursuing professional financial advice. The limited literature on the effectiveness of financial advice in terms of financial well-being suggests a positive link. However, no study has collectively examined the influence of financial literacy, trust and financial adviser anxiety on financial advice seeking and well-being in Australia. We conclude by discussing further gaps, policy recommendations, the recently introduced amendments to the Australian Corporations Act and several directions for future research, which may provide theoretical and practical benefits to policy-makers, industry professionals, academics and individuals.

Inefficiency persistence is often ignored in empirical studies that assess school efficiency levels. Using longitudinal data on state and state-dependent private schools from 62 New Zealand territories, a dynamic random-effect stochastic frontier model is employed to obtain the magnitude of inefficiency persistence along with the measure of cost efficiency estimates. The results show that a naive non-dynamic model incorrectly shows New Zealand schools to be highly cost-efficient in short run. However, the dynamic model exposes the fact that New Zealand state schools face high persistence in cost inefficiency, which is limiting their ability to provide cost-efficient schooling in long run. Furthermore, an estimated 9% of the annual state school funding is lost due to the persistence in cost inefficiency. The findings of this study indicate that cost inefficiency among New Zealand schools appears to be long run, requiring significant policy change from the national government.

Advances in conceptualisation of financial well-being include factoring future outlook into models, as consumers under financial stress can still expect to be better off in the future. This study applies a financial well-being framework to Australian university students, defining financial well-being to be made up of a set of personal attributes, current money management indicators and expectations about the financial future. We find that being least satisfied with financial situation is associated with higher likelihoods of using short-term credit, not having a financial safety net, not being willing to take financial risks and having negative expectations of the future. The results of this study are useful for educators and policy-makers in designing policies and programmes for university students.

Australian business schools are often viewed by senior university managers as 'cash cows' because of their revenue-raising capacity. However, a competing view has emerged that challenges their status as 'cash cows' and contends, instead, that business schools should focus on maximising 'public value' as a means to enhance their legitimacy. Using the analytic framework of 'public value,' a broad cross section of Australian business schools deans was interviewed. These interviews afforded a greater understanding of how the tensions inherent in these competing narratives are reconciled, and how they impact on the day-to-day management of business schools in Australia.

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.