Australian Economic Papers最新文献

This study aims to explore the impact of tunnelling by ultimate owners on the relation between managerial compensation and earnings management. Using a sample of the Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2019, we find that tunnelling by ultimate owners leads to adjustments in pay-performance sensitivity and impinges on the magnitude of earnings management. In private-dominated firms, tunnelling by ultimate owners reduces pay-performance sensitivity, and the decreased pay-performance incentives do not motivate managers to inflate corporate profits by manipulating earnings information. Moreover, owing to managers' resistances, tunnelling does not generate more severe problems in the quality of earnings information. In state-dominated firms, due to government regulation, tunnelling by ultimate owners does not induce significant adjustments in pay-performance sensitivity. However, due to the strong motivation of managers delighting their superiors in the administrative hierarchy by adjusting financial reporting, the quality of earnings information of state-dominated firms may be worse. Our results suggest that in firms with concentrated ownership structures-irrespective of the nature of ownership, both the formulation and implementation of managerial compensation incentive programmes, and the magnitude of earnings management, are equilibrium results of a dynamic game between ultimate owners and managers.

To examine the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and carbon emissions from the perspective of the threshold effects of energy service availability and energy consumption cleanliness, this study employs the panel data of 16 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership member countries for the period 1990–2019. Using panel threshold models, this study finds that energy service availability and energy consumption cleanliness are two significant threshold variables in the process by which FDI inflows affect carbon emissions. Before they reach a certain level, FDI inflows aggravate carbon emissions, but this association becomes negative after reaching the threshold level. Furthermore, this study also indicates that the threshold values are different depending on national conditions. Specifically, countries with favourable technological development or stronger environmental regulations have lower threshold values for the two variables, while countries with a higher degree of industrial added value have higher threshold values. Based on these findings, this study recommends enhancing energy service availability and energy consumption cleanliness and formulating related industrial, technological and legal policies based on different national conditions.

This paper analyses the persistence of research intensity in the OECD over the period 1870–2018. The goal is to test if the conclusion of the study conducted by Ang and Madsen (Ang, J. B., & Madsen, J. B. (2011). Can second-generation endogenous growth models explain the productivity trends and knowledge production in the Asian miracle economies? The Review of Economics and Statistics 2011, 93(4), 1360–1373), namely that the Schumpeterian growth models predict that research intensity is stationary, is correct. Using fractional integration methods on annual research intensity from 16 OECD countries, we observe that the series are very persistent. The order of integration is observed to be statistically higher than 1 in all the countries except Spain, rejecting thus the hypothesis of stationarity. When the likelihood of non-linear trends is considered in the analysis, the results are not materially different. An implication of the results is that policies aimed at boosting research activities will have a long-term impact on research intensity.

This paper aims to answer two important questions: first, does child mortality reduce with better access to sanitation and safe drinking water? second, does life expectancy improve by adopting safer sanitation and drinking water facilities? The study also accounts for other important variables in the models, such as household final consumption expenditure, per capita income, and urbanisation. The study employs robust panel econometric techniques to achieve the study objectives using annual data of 100 countries from 1990 to 2015. Our findings establish that sanitation and safe drinking water facilities have a significant negative and positive impacts on child mortality and life expectancy, respectively. Our results also suggest that the effect is more from safe drinking water facilities than the sanitation across both models. The robustness check results confirm that access to sanitation and water facilities in rural and urban areas also plays a vital role in reducing child mortality and improving quality of life by increasing life expectancy. Our study provides some policy suggestions and adds value to the body of knowledge.

Geoff Harcourt's narrative about his connections with the Australian Economic Papers -henceforth AEP - (Harcourt, 2014) is most enlightening, as is the Interview with Dr. Tran-Nam (Harcourt, 2016) also in AEP. This Portrait for the AEP is complemented by them.

Although a ‘complete’ portrait of this remarkable man can only be gleaned from his publishing and academic activities of over 65 years, as a defender and, more importantly, an indefatigable progenitor of post-Keynesianism, his writings and editorial activities of the last seven or eight years are most telling.

However, I should emphasise the fact that by choice, Harcourt has avoided axioms, theorems and proofs of a mathematical nature - except in Harcourt (1972; but see p.13), but even in that neither theorems nor proofs are in the index to that book; this is natural for someone who thinks that ‘mathematics is a bad master’ (Harcourt, 2003, p. 70).

In his literally last publication before he, and his wife, Joan, left for Cambridge - which was their home for 28 years - Harcourt paid homage to Lorie Tarshis (Harcourt, 1982a, p. 609, ff¹) as an ‘early post Keynesian’ and referred to it as ‘a loose term designed to cover those who either were pupils of and/or worked with and/or were strongly influenced by Keynes.’ Tarshis, together with Mabel Timlin, were two Canadians whom he had great respect for as early propagators of the Keynes of the GT, although they had, via Wynne Plumptree, mastered Keynes of the Treatise, as well. In the book of Sinha and Thomas (2019, p. 99), reflecting on his past convictions, he felt able to say that ‘[he] took a post-Keynesian approach long before [he] knew what post-Keynesian economics was Harcourt (2019, p. 99).’

However, the third period in Cambridge - from 1982 to 2010 - consolidated his post-Keynesianism, in particular his allegiance to the methodology and macroeconomic analysis of Keynes, Kalecki and Joan Robinson. Harcourt's adherence to Kahn, Kaldor and Sraffa were also strengthened but they reflected his interests, particularly, in the time-scale and multiplier of macroeconomics, income distribution and returns to scale. He remained wedded to equilibrium, but not necessarily competitive, analysis. Harcourt felt, increasingly, that it was Kalecki who provided the impetus for fiscal and monetary intervention via his distribution considerations, whilst Joan Robinson gave the rationale - with her golden age analysis - the bridge between the economists and the accountants. Keynes, in his path from the Tract to the GT, via the Treatise (and the ‘Circus’), provided a much-improved argument for the fallacy of composition in a largely capitalist economy, which cemented the concepts and activism of the post-Keynesians.

However, Harcourt continued to rely on one of his earlies

Geoff Harcourt was an Australian economist who split his time between Australia and Cambridge, UK with stints in Toronto, Canada and Tokyo, Japan. He passed away on 7^th December 2021 aged 90 after several illnesses that had plagued his health since his early sixties after a particularly vigorous and active sports loving middle age. He regarded himself as ‘a Cambridge economist and an Australian patriot’ and was always proud of his contribution to Australian economic policy whilst at the University of Adelaide especially the founding of Australian Economic Papers (AEP).

Geoffrey Colin Harcourt was born in Melbourne in 1931 into a warm hearted secular Jewish family. Harcourt's paternal grandparents Israel and Dinah Harkowitz had come to Australia from Romania (Transylvania) and Poland in the 19^th century and owned a series of General Stores in the New South Wales country supplied by the family paddle steamer ‘the Wandering Jew’ owned by Dinah's brother Daniel Berger. The Transylvanian heritage often brought remarks of the natural progression of Dracula to Blood Suckers and Economists!

Geoff's maternal grandparents Daniel and Edith Gans came from Germany and originally Lithuania (although Edith Isaacs was Australian born and related to Sir Isaac Isaacs the nation's first Australian born Governor General). Geoff is related on his mother's side to Joshua Gans, an Australian economist (now based in Toronto).

Geoff's own father, Kopel Harkowitz, and brother Sam, (the much loved Uncle Sam), changed the family name from Harkowitz to Harcourt, to get into golf clubs, surf clubs (in Bondi family lore has it they went from the Goldbergs to the Icebergs) and turf clubs (they even had a radio show named after them called ‘The Racing Harcourts’).

After struggling at secondary school, at Wesley College, despite help from a very academic twin brother John Harcourt (who later became an eminent Dental Academic) and cousin Richard (a successful Chemistry academic) Geoff was a brilliant student at the University of Melbourne in the Commerce Department and at Queens College, (tutored by eminent Labour Economist Joe Isaac). Geoff was trained in the applied tradition of Melbourne and the great Melbourne Institute for Applied Economics and Social Research (MIAESR) and conducted mainly empirically-based surveys supervised by the charismatic Richard ‘Dick’ Downing. In fact, Geoff's cousin Richard Harcourt married Alison Harcourt (previously Alison Doig) was also part of that tradition as she worked as the Statistician on the influential poverty line research of MIAESR, together with Ronald Henderson and John Harper which resulted in the important policy recommendations and the famous Henderson, Harper and Harcourt research that become known as ‘The Henderson Poverty Line’.

After completing his M. Comm at Melbourne Geoff won a PhD scholarship to study at Kings College at the University of Cambridge, which was exc

Performance-based research funding systems (PBRFS) have been introduced in many countries for allocating funding to research institutions. There continues to be considerable debate about the effectiveness and consequences of these systems. This paper suggests several methods that can be applied to evaluate how institutions respond to new incentives created by the introduction of a PBRFS. The methods are illustrated using longitudinal data from the New Zealand PBRFS, which assesses institutional performance and allocates funds based on individual researcher performance, although not all methods require individual data. Longitudinal data enable the identification of entry, exit and quality transformation of researchers and the contribution of these dynamics to changes in university and discipline research quality. The approach enables a deeper understanding of individual and institutional responses to PBRFSs, the sustainability of changes and the contributions of changes in researcher quality and discipline composition to changes in institutional performance.

This paper analyses agricultural green efficiency and productivity by using the farming and livestock industries as case studies. To do so, nitrogen and phosphorus surpluses in arable land are measured by considering recycling of agricultural wastes in the farming and livestock ecosystem and defined as the undesirable output in agricultural production. The empirical analysis is based on data of rural areas in Anhui province, China, over the period of 2000 to 2017. It shows the existence of considerable nitrogen and phosphorus nutrient surplus in arable land, with phosphorus surplus keeps increasing. It also illustrates that nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients from manure were decreasing while those from the crop residues were increasing. The empirical assessment demonstrates that agricultural green efficiency tended to converge over time. Furthermore, agricultural green total factor productivity showed an overall increasing trend, although its components, efficiency change and technological progress, moved in opposite directions in most years. Finally, some useful policy recommendations are provided in this paper.

Innovation plays a vital role in driving Australia's economic growth, and the desire to quantify this relationship is ever present. This article quantifies the relationship between domestic gross expenditure on research and development (R&D) and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita growth to estimate the return on investment (ROI) to innovation for Australia. This article adopts the Jones and Summers (2020) approach to quantify the ROI of gross R&D spending for Australia. This novel yet simple macroeconomic approach complements other existing methodologies. It quantifies only economic benefits, excluding non-monetary societal and environmental benefits. The baseline results state that $1 of R&D investment creates an average of $20.8 in economy-wide benefits in today's dollars, and investment in R&D creates an average annual return of 104% for Australia. Importantly, this baseline result can be recalculated with adjustments to account for specific features of innovation activity. Incorporating a 10-year delay between R&D and payoffs, combined with a correction for building R&D into new capital inputs (known as embodied capital deepening) to account for the additional time and costs associated with R&D expenditure yields lower results of $3.5 of economy-wide benefits and 10% average annual return for every dollar spent on R&D. Even when corrections are applied to the baseline for conservative estimates, the economy-wide returns to innovation are comparable to historical private investment returns in Australia.

This study examines whether common ownership affects stock price crash risk (SPCR). Using 3,159 companies listed in China between 2006 and 2019, this paper finds that companies with common ownership are associated with lower SPCR. This finding can be explained by the monitoring effect of common ownership which holds that common ownership can curb the hoarding of bad news by managers and thereby reduces SPCR. We further show that the effect is more evident when common owners hold a relatively larger number of same-industry firms, when common owners hold more shares, and for state-owned-enterprises. Moreover, this paper also demonstrates how common ownership facilitates effective monitoring and finds that common ownership reduces earnings management and increases accounting conservatism in firms. Our evidence suggests that common ownership serves as an effective form of monitoring by constraining managers' opportunistic behaviour, thereby reducing SPCR.