The paper analyzes some of the ingredients of currency hedging and portfolio construction against the framework of mean-variance efficient portfolios. The currency hedging analysis is based on a range of exchange rates, consisting of the domestic dollar vis-à-vis the US dollar, the euro, the...

We investigate to what extent reciprocity, exhibited by employers and employees, lead to stable gift exchange practices in the labour contract, giving rise to non-compensating wage differentials among industries and firms. We use the concept of Sequential Reciprocity Equilibrium (Dufwenberg and...

This paper discusses an empirical study conducted in Sydney’s upper north shore with the primary aim of estimating the market price differential between heritage-listed and regular, unlisted houses using the hedonic price technique. The research also examined the relationship between market...

There is widely perceived to be a public liability crisis in Australia. This paper analyses whether court awards for injuries are excessive. The paper has two main parts. The first part outlines a normative basis for the sizes of awards based on the principles of welfare economics and the...

This paper describes and explains changes in real house prices in Australia from 1970 to 2003. In the first part of the paper, we develop a national index of real house prices. We then discuss the main factors that determine real house prices and some previous attempts to model Australian house...

The paper starts with a brief introduction to the main principles of outsourcing and a description of the recent history of outsourcing in the two largest states, New South Wales and Victoria. The main part of the paper then describes seven case studies which exemplify the process and possible...

Inflation targeting needs to be supplemented by an economic growth target so that central banks will not adopt monetary policy which results in stagnation. There is no guarantee that the economy will move towards full employment by itself when the inflation rate is kept between two to three per...

We derive a measure of firm speed of price adjustment that is directly inversely related to market power and compare this to the measure derived by Martin (1993). However, both measures are incorrect when firms have non-zero price conjectural variations and treat competing price levels as...

There has been much recent interest in forecasting based on factor analysis models for large numbers of observable variables (p) and large numbers of observations (T). Some nice asymptotic results have been produced showing that under certain conditions, as (p,T) ? (8, 8) principal components...

When the demand for money is infinitely the interest elastic, injecting base money into the system is akin to money being sucked into a Black Hole. Economics activity will not be revived by driving the rate of interest to zero. Full employment can only be restored by a judicious combination of...