Australian Economic Papers最新文献

This paper represents a significant extension of the traditional Cournot extraction game, by introducing the linear supply function strategy space in a novel, dynamic way. A variety of asymmetric cases are considered, including the new firm-specific competitive strategies. The results highlight the importance of competition in accelerating the supply of critical minerals, which is vital to mitigate climate change, but also present a new sustainability challenge.

This paper leverages a rich dataset of 1.24 billion traffic flow observations across 36,666 vehicle detectors to estimate the price elasticity of traffic flow with respect to fuel prices in Melbourne, Australia. I find that a 1% increase in fuel prices leads to a 0.0556% decrease in traffic flow across Melbourne, where traffic flow is defined as the number of vehicles passing a vehicle counter per hour. I find significant regional heterogeneity across Melbourne, with evidence of positive own-price elasticities in regions in the centre of the city, and in peak commute times on both weekdays and weekends, which I argue is evidence of a congestion-speed effect. Moreover, regions near the CBD with high incomes tend to be less elastic than regions further away with reduced access to public transport. These findings can be used to determine the optimal tax or charge to internalise the externalities produced by motor vehicles.

I exploit data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and linked administrative data to study the effect of various parenting styles on a child's academic achievement and development of non-cognitive skills at age 14. My results suggest the authoritative parenting style, characterised as disciplined but warm parenting, to be optimal for test scores, prosocial behaviour, and ability to focus. For test scores, I find a greater effect if this parenting style was applied 4 years prior rather than more recently. Conversely for non-cognitive skills, I find a greater effect from contemporaneous parenting. The implication of my results is to encourage authoritative parenting from an early age but also highlight its continued importance in the present.

Introduction of stay-at-home orders during the COVID 19 pandemic led to immediate disruption of individuals' daily routines with confinement to their households and changes in risk factors of domestic violence. Utilising data from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR), I estimate the causal impact of stay-at-home orders on domestic violence assaults in New South Wales. Since adoption dates for these restrictions varied across LGAs, I implement a staggered difference-in-difference (DiD) specification. I find a 21% decline in daily domestic violence assault incidents during stay-at-home order periods compared to pre-restriction incidence levels. These results are robust under weekly frequency and extrapolated fixed effects models. I further utilise google search term data as a proxy of consistent reporting rates and unemployment data to identify household power dynamics. Analysis of both data sets support estimates of declines in domestic violence during stay-at-home order periods.

This thesis examines how monetary policy shocks affect wealth inequality in Australia. I analyse how a monetary policy shock, through asset price responses, affects household balance sheets and wealth inequality measures. I find that contractionary monetary policy reduces the wealth gap, but also disproportionately increases the wealth share of the most affluent Australians. This is driven largely by the response of house prices to an increase in the central bank's policy rate. I use a novel methodology to overcome the data limitations that usually impede studies of wealth inequality, and I produce results with implications for central bankers and policymakers. My results are robust to numerous lag specifications, modelling techniques and identification strategies.

This thesis explores whether monetary policy reacts to house price movements, by employing a New Keynesian model with a housing factor and estimated using Bayesian estimation techniques. The primary emphasis of this study is on the United States, with supplementary analyses on central banks in several advanced economies. The principal finding of this thesis reveals that the Federal Reserve responded substantially but episodically to house prices. Furthermore, my investigation indicates that the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Bank of England, and the European Central Bank did not incorporate house prices into their policy framework, whereas the Bank of Canada did so episodically. The baseline results remain robust across a range of sensitivity checks.

This paper explores the effects of union involvement in enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) on non-wage outcomes. My research is carried out through using a dataset of all federal EBAs in Australia from 1997 to 2021 and utilises fixed effects regressions. An index was constructed of 10 variables to capture a comprehensive overview of non-wage outcomes. This paper finds that union involvement in an EBA, on average, is associated with a 0.494 unit increase in the index, or a 13.5% increase on the average index score. Overall, these results provide further insight into union impacts on the labour market within the enterprise bargaining framework.

Since its emergence in 2020, COVID-19 has profoundly influenced the Taiwan economy and employment landscape, leading to differential impacts across sectors. In response to this unprecedented crisis, the Taiwanese government promptly enacted the “Special Regulations on the Prevention and Rescue of Severe Specific Infectious Pneumonia” on February 25, 2020, which came into force on March 13. This study examines the pandemic's effects through various stages, with a particular focus on the service industry, the sector most affected owing to diminished domestic demand. Using a computable general equilibrium model by integrating monthly changes, the study assess the effectiveness of the Taiwan government's interventions in mitigating job losses and stabilising the economy. Our findings indicate that without the government's relief and revitalisation measures, unemployment rates would have surged significantly. The study underscores the critical role of policy interventions in mitigating the economic impacts of the pandemic.

A proper government-market relationship (GMR) serves as an important institutional environment for investors to make rational economic decisions. Theoretically, by embedding the GMR into the signalling model, this study finds that (a) the improvement in the GMR can enable high-return firms to obtain more debt financing and (b) the mechanism is that a higher GMR, as a signal, increases the accuracy of investors' inference on firms' returns. Using data of Chinese A-share listed firms (2009–2019) and the two-step system GMM, this study empirically demonstrates that the GMR does help investors infer firms' returns more accurately, thus enlarging the debt financing scales of high-return firms. Moreover, the positive impact of the GMR on high-return firms is significant within privately owned firms and more substantial in markets characterised by lower industry concentration.