Dr Martin Lally presented The Impact of Regulation on the Firm's Cost of Capital at the ISCR forum, The Cost of Capital for the Regulated Firm in August 2003

This paper has developed an estimator for a country's market risk premium that involves optimally combining an estimate based upon only local historical data over 100 years and the cross-country average. This paper has also compared the combined estimator to that of its two components, and the...

This paper describes and analyses the recommendations of the government’s covid-19 advisers, with particular emphasis on their use or otherwise of cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In respect of Professors Baker and Wilson, their views markedly fluctuated: on whether mitigation or elimination was...

There is currently a pronounced lack of uniformity in the values placed on a life by different New Zealand government entities taking actions designed to save lives. Various explanations are offered for this, but none justifies the inconsistencies. Equity suggests that all QALYs be equally...

A recent review of empirical estimates of the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) concluded that ‘the US marginal top rate is far from the top of the Laffer curve’ (Saez et al, 2012, p.42). This paper provides a detailed examination of the analysis underlying this conclusion, and considers...

Imports into New Zealand are tax-free if the duty and GST payable is less than $60. This has resulted in an effective value threshold of between $226 and $399, significantly higher than many of our trading partners. We examine other nations’ thresholds and border practices with a view to...

This paper considers the use of alternative welfare metrics in evaluations of income inequality in a multi-period context. Using Norwegian longitudinal income data, it is found, as in many studies, that inequality is lower when each individual’s annual average income is used as welfare metric,...

This paper presents two ‘non-welfarist’ approaches and one ‘welfarist’ approach to decompose changes in inequality and social welfare into three components: population, tax policy and labour supply effects. As an illustration, changes in inequality and in values of a social welfare...

Firms that lie far behind the technological frontier have the most to gain from imitating the technology or management practices of others. That some firms converge relatively slowly to the productivity frontier suggests the existence of factors that cause them to underinvest in their...

The global economic crisis has highlighted the continuing problem of tax evasion. For tax agencies to respond, an important antecedent necessitates knowing the extent of the problem. This study is the first to comprehensively review recent research on the tax gap. Our primary contributions are...