Economic Record最新文献

Previous research argues that occupational gender pay gaps arise from greedy jobs within occupations. Greedy jobs involve working long and unpredictable hours in jobs where individuals are not easily substitutable. They engender compensating differentials resulting in an earnings-to-hours elasticity that often exceeds 1. This paper shows that greedy jobs also exist in Australia, where labour market institutions differ substantially from those in the United States. It shows that occupational gender earnings gaps are highest in occupations where greedy jobs proliferate. Wage-setting institutions engender heterogeneous effects on occupational gender earnings gaps. Relative to the United States, occupational gender earnings gaps are smaller in Australia, consistent with evidence that labour market institutions compress the earnings distribution. Within occupations, the use of collective agreements attenuates the size of occupational gender earnings gaps, while the use of individual agreements increases them. Not surprisingly, individuals employed in greedy occupations predominantly use individual agreements to negotiate pay.

We examine the bunching behaviour of individuals in Australia in response to an extra 15 per cent tax on compulsory retirement contributions imposed on those earning more than $ A250,000. We find almost no bunching by wage and salary earners. There is extensive bunching by those with business or trust income. For this group, we estimate an elasticity of taxable income of 0.027. Females and older workers are more likely to bunch. The results suggest that the tax induces a tax planning response but little labour supply response.

The concern that income inequality might have a deleterious impact on government goes back well over 2300 years. In recent times, the focus has settled on the threat posed by an association between inequality and government expenditure. In this work we investigate inequality and expenditure from the perspective of a jurisdiction wherein taxes have little association with incomes, taxation limitations apply and few goods are redistributive in nature. This context prompts us to adapt and propose an alternate explanation by which to investigate matters. Our work concludes with a reflection on the importance of testing old ideas in new contexts.

DSGE models incorporate attractive theoretical specifications of the behaviour of forward-looking consumers facing an uncertain future. Central to these specifications is the idea that consuming agents decide their consumption level in year t by applying a function (policy rule) whose arguments represent information available in year t. Using the insight that, under certain conditions, the policy rule (but not the resulting policy) is invariant through time, DSGE modellers have developed the perturbation and other methods for quantitatively specifying policy rules. They have applied these methods in models with limited sectoral disaggregation. In this paper we adapt the perturbation method so that it can be used to specify a policy rule for consumption in a full-scale CGE model. A novel feature of our method is the use of specially constructed CGE simulations to reveal key parameters used in deriving the policy rule. We apply our method in illustrative simulations of the effects of a technology shock in a 70-sector version of the USAGE model of the US economy.