George Stigler, as much if not more than his colleague Milton Friedman, greatly shaped the direction of economics in the post-war era. Part of his ability to do so lay in his critical responses to views that opposed his own fiercely held framework. This paper attempts to supply a consistent...

Full employment is a necessary prerequisite before the gains from international trade can be specified. Yet the assumption of full employment is seldom acknowledged by economists when advancing policy advice, and nor is it made clear in the policy infrastructure of such bodies as the WTO. The...

Carroll, Fuhrer and Wilcox (1994) studied the capacity of consumer sentiment to help explain the behaviour of consumption in the US. Their study was important for at least two reasons. Firstly, since household consumption accounts for about 80% of US GDP fluctuations in consumption may result in...

In this note we consider the treatment of structural breaks in VAR models used to test for unit roots and cointegration. We give practical guidelines for the inclusion and the specification of intervention dummies in those models.

The standard quadratic price adjustment cost function makes no allowance for firm size or for scale economies. Incorporating quadratic price adjustment costs into the profit function, a firm's speed of price adjustment is both shown to be a positive/negative function of its size when firms have...

In the 1940s Australian economists sought an international agreement that would bind countries to the pursuit of full employment. Seen by them as a necessary prerequisite to agreements on monetary and commercial policy, this 'employment approach' was advanced with a 'crusading zeal' before the...

The purpose of this paper is to quantify the efficiency with which Australian universities utilise their teaching resources. The study estimates the cost efficiency of 36 universities over the period 1995-2002 using stochastic frontier analysis. The present study differs from previous cost and...

This study contributes, on the basis of economic theory, to an explanation of exchange rate volatilities for a large number of currencies. We relate daily changes in GARCH(1,1) volatilities of exchange rates to the volatility changes of several of their presumed fundamental economic...

This paper examines and dissects ten popular "suspect" conjectures about exchange rates. The conjectures are the following: (1) Economists know what determines the exchange rate (2) Flexible exchange rates are unstable due to destabilising speculation (3) Flexible exchange rates are excessively...

The experimental and field studies surveyed by Latane and Nida (1981) establish an inverse relationship between the probability that a person is helped and the size of the group of potential helpers. Harrington (2001) attempts to account for this phenomenon using a 'rational choice' model in...