This paper inserts Veblen’s (1898) concepts of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption into a very simple model. Individuals have the choice to either invest their time into working, leading to easily observable levels of consumption, or into conspicuous leisure, whose effect on...

This paper presents an analysis of the 2005-06 family tax system comprising the personal income tax, the Medicare Levy, Family Tax Benefits Parts A and B and tax offsets. The results show that most families are now taxed, in effect, on the basis of joint income. Through a succession of reforms...

We present identification and estimation results for the 'collective' model of labour supply in which there are discrete choices, censoring of hours and non-participation in employment. We derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions and contrast them with restrictions implied...

Implementing incentive systems can sometimes backfire in practice: experimental evidence and folklore both suggest that offers of explicit rewards can expose surprising discontinuities in behaviour. This Paper models two such discontinuities that have been claimed by psychologists and...

This paper studies the interactions between an individual's self-esteem and his social environment - in the workplace, at school, and in personal relationships. Because a person generally has only imperfect knowledge of his own abilities, people who derive benefits from his performance (parent,...

Liquidity constraints can affect self-employment in a number of ways. They can prohibit potential entrepreneurs from starting up in business, they can restrict the growth of existing entrepreneurial activities and, in the extreme, they can result in small business failure. This paper uses...

We address the question of how labour supply responds to anticipated wage growth, unanticipated wage growth, and wage risk. We use the 1989-93 panel section of the Bank of Italy SHIW, which collects individual-based quantitative expectation of future wage growth. The use of subjective...