The impact of natural disasters on the Australian equity market is examined. The data set employed consists of daily price and accumulation returns over the period 31 December 1982-1 January 2002 for the All Ordinaries Index (AOI) and a record of 42 severe storms, floods, cyclones, earthquakes...

Using a number of alternative approaches, Sichel (1994) demonstrated evidence supporting the notion that the US business cycle is best characterized as having three distinct phases, viz. contraction, followed by rapid expansion during the early stages of the recovery phase, followed by a period...

Due to well-known lags, counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies often exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, business cycles. Early recognition of upcoming phase shifts, particularly contractions, may assist in fine-tuning such policies. This objective is pursued in the paper by applying Hamilton's...

This paper draws its title from a paper written over 35 years ago by Geoffrey H. Moore (1967). Why the need for a reprise? First, there would appear currently to be somewhat diverging views as to what properly constitutes a recession. Second, largely as a result of this, in many countries other...

A new business cycle turning point signalling system is proposed and examined by using Japanese, US and Australian composite indexes of economic activity. Time varying transition probabilities in a Markov regime-switching model are used as the basis of the signalling system. The performance of...

By mid-2008 the world was witnessing the unfolding of a relatively rare macroeconomic phenomenon, namely, the onset of what one might call a synchronized international -- or ‘world’ -- recession. But what exactly is a ‘synchronized world recession’? This article proposes a practical...

Using the planning and regulatory function of 173 NSW local governments, several approaches for incorporating contextual or non-discretionary inputs in data envelopment analysis (DEA) are compared. Non-discretionary inputs (or factors beyond managerial control) in this context include the...

This article examines discernable patterns of real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth co-movements across 29 countries, using consistent time series data (1912--2008). Of these countries, only 12 are found to form three statistically significant groupings (i.e. G6-six Organization for Economic...

There is a growing policy focus in Australian higher education on quantitative research performance assessment. However, most of the analysis has addressed aggregate performance at the institutional level, an approach inconsistent with recent policy emphasis on diversity among universities and...

This note examines the productive efficiency of 62 starting guards during the 2011/12 National Basketball Association (NBA) season. This period coincides with the phenomenal and largely unanticipated performance of New York Knicks’ starting point guard Jeremy Lin and the attendant public and...