The recent meltdown in some Asian economies highlights the urgent need of more proper measures of economic performance. Measures such as GNP growth rates alone are not good enough in revealing the true strength of an economy unless costs of capitals are also examined. In recent years, there have...

While it is correct to say that Carlyle first applied the exact phrase “dismal science” to political economy in his 1849 article on plantation labour in the West Indies, I argue that Carlyle came to the view that political economy was “dismal” well before that time. Indeed, his negative...

It is well known from the work of S. Ross that a securities market is complete if and only if each call option can be replicated using available securities. The present short note announces the following surprising complementary result to Ross' important contribution. . If the number of...

This paper shows that, indeed , Aumann's classical existence and equivalence theorems depend on there being many more agents than commodities. We show that for an arbitrary atomless measure space of agents three is a fixed non-separable infinite dimensional commodity space in which one can...

Overeducation is a form of labour underutilisation which occurs when the formal education level of a worker exceeds that which is required for the job. In Australia close to 30 per cent of workers are overeducated and are underutilising their skills. Using data from the Negotiating the Life...

This paper examines the sources of economic growth in Australia from 1960 to 2000 by adapting and modifying a framework developed in Jones (2002), whereby long-run growth is driven by the global discovery of new ideas, which in turn is tied to world population growth. We find that, contrary to...

The paper introduces a multiplicative drift condition for evaluating stochastic economic models. The drift condition is shown to permit computation of quantitative bounds for extreme event probabilities in terms of the model primitives. By way of illustration, the technique is applied to a...