Simple theorems based on a mathematical property of vecY/vecX provide powerful tools for obtaining matrix calculus results. By way of illustration, new results are obtained for matrix derivatives involving vecA, vechA, v(A) and vecX where X is a symmetric matrix. The analysis explains exactly...

How homogenous is the market for top managerial talent? We analyse data from university annual reports on Vice Chancellors’ remuneration for the period 1995-2002 and test to see whether there is alignment between the market for Vice-Chancellors and the market for CEOs in Australia. While the...

Growth in the world economy is not shared equally among all countries, with some growing faster, some slower and some not at all. The cross-country distribution of growth is a useful tool for analysing the inequality of growth. The appropriately-weighted first moment of this distribution is...

In this paper we test the hypothesis advanced by Weiss (1995) that under sorting models the return to schooling across identical twins would decline over time compared to the return for the population as a whole. The analyses undertaken on a relatively large sample of Australian twins are...

The oldest university still in operation is approximately 1,750 years old (wordiQ.com, 2004). When compared to firms, universities have stood the test of time, while firms seem to lack longevity. The oldest listed firm still operating is around 225 years old (O’Hara and Mandel, 2004), a...

The large US-China trade imbalance is a common cause for concern and regularly blamed on the undervaluation of the RMB. We estimate a simple model of the trade balance and simulate the long-run effects on the trade balance of RMB revaluations in the range of 10-50%. We find that improvements in...

Building on purchasing power parity theory, this paper proposes a new approach to forecasting exchange rates using the Big Mac data from The Economist magazine. Our approach is attractive in three aspects. Firstly, it uses easily-available Big Mac prices as input. These prices avoid several...