Despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature, no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the impact of political democracy on economic growth. This paper challenges the consensus of an inconclusive relationship through a quantitative assessment of the democracy-growth literature....

Card and Krueger’s (1995a) meta-analysis of the employment effects of minimum wages challenged existing theory. Unfortunately, their meta-analysis confused publication selection with the absence of a genuine empirical effect. We apply recently developed meta-analysis methods to 64 US minimum...

The Curious Case of the Occidental and Regal: The Evolution of Solvency and Disclosure Standards in the Australian Life Insurance Industry In 1990 the Australian life insurance industry was rocked by scandal which threatened to destabilise consumer confidence in the ability of insurance...

We study the optimal size of a pay-as-you-go social security program for an economy composed of both permanent-income and hand-to-mouth consumers. While previous work on this topic is framed within a two-period partial equilibrium setup, we study this issue in a life-cycle general equilibrium...

The value of accurate weather forecast information is substantial. In this paper we examine competition among forecast providers and its implications for the quality of forecasts. A simple economic model shows that an economic bias geographical inequality in forecast accuracy arises due to the...

The City of Casey in Victoria is the third most rapidly growing region of Australia in terms of population expansion and housing development. Infrastructure and services development do not appear to be growing at the same pace. Job leakages into the surrounding regions are high being around 80%....

This paper considers the labour management practices in use in Australian life insurance industry during the inter war period. Using the Australian Mutual Provident as a case study, it is argued that the specific human resource management practices evolved to deal with separate sets of problems...

In the neoclassical growth theory, higher saving rate gives rise to higher output per capita. However, in the Keynesian model, higher saving rate causes lower consumption, which may lead to a recession. Students may ask, “Should we save or should we consume?” In most of the macroeconomics...

We examine a principal-agent model with moral hazard in which the technology – the vector of probability distributions from the agent’s actions to the possible outcomes – is initially unknown. A signal correlated with the technology is observed after the principal and agent agree to the...