There have been rising levels of inequality in the earnings distribution in some OECD countries (principally the English-speaking ones) together with stubbornly higher levels of unemployment in many others. Australia has shared in the rise in earnings inequality, but not to the degree that the...

There has been a great deal of turnmoil in the Australian labour market over the past 25 years. This paper describes the main features of the changes which have occured over the principal dimensions of the work environment.

A long-term assessment of Asia's share of global GDP suggests that Asia has now almost reclaimed the role in the global economy it occupied in 1820. By focusing on the experience of key economies in Asia, this paper assesses why the continent's role weakened between 1820 and 1950 and...

This paper relies on daily price indices for stocks and bonds to analyze the functioning of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) in the period 1931-1940. Although the TSE was a large and liquid market, its pricing mechanisms significantly deviated from weak-form efficiency. In this context, zaibatsu...

This paper considers the evidence on real commodity prices over 160 years for 30 commodities representing 7.89 trillion USD worth of production in 2011. In so doing, it suggests and documents a complete typology of real commodity prices, comprising long-run trends, medium-run cycles, and...

Railroads in Meiji Japan are credited with facilitating factor mobility as well as access to human and financial capital, but the impact on firms is unclear. Using a newly developed firm-level dataset and a difference-in-differences model that exploits the temporal and spatial variation of...

The early 21st century saw Australia experience its largest and longest terms of trade boom. This paper places this recent boom in a long-run historical context by comparing the current episode with earlier cycles. While similarities exist across most episodes, current macroeconomic policy...

Outside the US, little is known of long-run trends in executive compensation. We fill this gap by studying BHP, a resources giant that has long been one of the largest companies on the Australian stock market. From 1887 to 2013, trends in CEO and director remuneration (relative to average...

Was nineteenth century Japan an example of finance-led growth? Using a new panel dataset of firms from the Meiji Period (1868-1912), this paper tests whether financial sector development influenced extensive firm activity across industries and locations. Results from a two-stage least squares...

Commodities have been central to structural change in the Australian economy with the 2000s expansion of mining seen as raising the spectre of the Dutch disease. If the assumption in the standard Heckscher-Olin trade model that labour and capital are not mobile between countries is relaxed, it...