New Zealand is unusual in that nearly 60% of local services are funded from property taxes. These are a mixture of land taxes, capital value taxes, annual rental value taxes and uniform general charges. We explore the efficiency and equity of this system at both national and local levels. We...

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of Iberian decline. I document and quantify the surge in ennoblement through a new time series of nobility cases preserved in the Archive of the Royal Chancery...

Recent empirical evidence, from countries in the European Union in particular, are much more ambiguous on the costs savings from private production of local public services than previous literature used to be. In this paper, an explanatory model of factors driving costs in solid waste collection...

On 28 August 1998 the Treasurer referred the impact of competition policy reforms on rural an regional Australia for inquiry and report within 12 months of receiving the reference. The Commission is to assess the impact (both transitional and ongoing) of the competition policy and related...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of a change in the minimum wage on income distribution and employment in a developing economy. The basic framework of our analysis is the original Harris- Todaro model, in which the only factor that is intersectorally mobile is labor. We...

Private equity funds of funds (FOFs) have become big business. Today, FOFs form 14% of new money raised. I test six explanations for the rise of FOFs. First, I find that FOFs do not generally deliver superior returns. They do, however, do well enough for the limited partners (LPs) that hire...

The paper investigates the existence and extent of economies of scale in depository and settlement systems. Evidence from 16 settlement institutions across different regions for the years 1993–2000 indicates the existence of significant economies of scale. The degree of such economies,...

We study the behavior of real exchange rates in a two­country dynamic equilibrium model. In this model, consumers can only consume domestic goods but can invest costlessly in capital stocks of both countries. Nevertheless, transporting goods between the two countries is costly and, hence, the...

The paper investigates the existence and extent of economies of scale in depository and settlement systems. Evidence from 16 settlement institutions across different regions for the years 1993–2000 indicates the existence of significant economies of scale. The degree of such economies,...