Not all firms contributed to Australia's impressive productivity growth in the 1990s. Some performed better than others, and entrants arrived even as incumbents exited. If firms make decisions on input demand and liquidation based on their productivity, the latter known to them but unobserved by...

This article applies an analytical bias correction technique for inequality measures to income data from China and Kenya. We use the coefficient of variation squared and illustrate how the bias is downward for positively skewed distributions. The analytical bias correction technique is then...

Previous empirical studies have noted the higher marginal propensity to consume food out of food stamps in the United States, compared to that out of cash income. Analyzing data from U.S. Food Stamp Program participants, we find evidence that this discrepancy may be driven primarily by the...

We examine a Markov-Switching model of Singaporean GDP using a combination of formal moment-based tests and informal graphical tests. The tests confirm that the Markov-Switching model fits the data better than a linear, autoregressive alternative. The methods are extended to allow us to identify...

We assemble a database consisting of 52 regulatory decisions made by seven different regulators across five different industries. We examine how the proportion of firms' revenue requirements that were disallowed by the regulator vary by regulator, industry and time. Despite the differences in...

Australian industry is characterised by differences across firms, entry of new firms and exit of unsuccessful firms. These facts highlight the inappropriateness of measuring productivity using aggregate production functions based upon representative firms. In this study, we model heterogeneous...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate a 'couples-based' policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families with dependent children in which no adult was in paid employment. Selected women on family benefits (who were partnered with men receiving unemployment benefits)...

This paper proposes a set of formal tests to address the goodness-of-fit of Markov switching models. These formal tests are constructed as tests of model consistency and of both parametric and non-parametric encompassing. The formal tests are then combined with informal tests using simulation in...

We study work hours of Australian couples using a structural labour-supply model. We introduce model improvements which allow error in wage estimation and unobserved influences on partners' non-market time to be correlated with one another and with own wage. This more realistic model produces...