Re-examining the sources of ethnic inequality in Vietnam, we use an instrumental variable approach to provide consistent estimators of explanatory variables at household and commune levels for ethnic differences in household expenditure per person. Four key conclusions are drawn. First, removing...

Women who have children miss out on potential earnings. This happens through a combination of time out of the labour force, reduced working hours and lower paying jobs. We examine mothers' forgone earnings using HILDA 2001 data and find substantial effects, which vary with the woman's education...

This paper analyses the properties of the fixed-effects vector decomposition estimator, an emerging and popular technique for estimating time-invariant variables in panel data models with unit effects. This estimator was initially motivated on heuristic grounds, and advocated on the strength of...

The method of 'excess sensitivity' of Bajada (1999, 2000, 2001) indicates a large underground economy in Australia, with estimates of unrecorded income approximately 15 per cent of official gross domestic product. These estimates concern policy-makers, especially those agencies responsible...

Bajada (2006) recognises that his earlier books and papers used a faulty method for measuring the underground economy in Australia. He also reports finding a new “more serious problem” in the method. All of these failures can be avoided, it is claimed, by reduced use of currency modelling...

Are global temperatures on a warming trend? It is difficult to be certain about trends when there is so much variation in the data and very high correlation from year to year. We investigate the question using statistical time series methods. Our analysis shows that the upward movement over the...

MIMIC models are being used to estimate the size of the underground economy or the tax gap in various countries. In this paper I examine critically both the method in general and three applications of the method by Giles and Tedds (2002), Bajada and Schneider (2005) and Dell’Anno and Schneider...

The method of "excess sensitivity" of Bajada (1999, 2001, 2002) indicates a large underground economy in Australia, with estimates of unrecorded income around 15 per cent of official GDP. These estimates concern policymakers, especially those agencies responsible for national accounts, tax...