Railroads in Meiji Japan are credited with facilitating factor mobility as well as access to human and financial capital, but the impact on firms is unclear. Using a newly developed firm-level dataset and a difference-in-differences model that exploits the temporal and spatial variation of...

The early 21st century saw Australia experience its largest and longest terms of trade boom. This paper places this recent boom in a long-run historical context by comparing the current episode with earlier cycles. While similarities exist across most episodes, current macroeconomic policy...

Outside the US, little is known of long-run trends in executive compensation. We fill this gap by studying BHP, a resources giant that has long been one of the largest companies on the Australian stock market. From 1887 to 2013, trends in CEO and director remuneration (relative to average...

Was nineteenth century Japan an example of finance-led growth? Using a new panel dataset of firms from the Meiji Period (1868-1912), this paper tests whether financial sector development influenced extensive firm activity across industries and locations. Results from a two-stage least squares...

Commodities have been central to structural change in the Australian economy with the 2000s expansion of mining seen as raising the spectre of the Dutch disease. If the assumption in the standard Heckscher-Olin trade model that labour and capital are not mobile between countries is relaxed, it...

The question of why more African Americans did not migrate earlier out of the stagnant and repressive South after emancipation remains open. Previous work has highlighted the role of demand and supply conditions. At the time, though, there was much concern about the role of emigrant agents who...

Over the last decade the locus of policy-making towards asylum seekers and refugees has shifted away from national governments and towards the EU as the Common European Asylum Policy has developed. Most of the focus has been on the harmonisation of policies relating to border control, the...

Australia is experiencing its largest mining boom for more than a century and a half. This paper explores, from a national perspective, important economic differences that arise when a mining boom, such as the current one, is generated by sustained export price increases (trading gains) rather...

Given its signiÖcance in practice, piecewise linear taxation has received relatively little attention in the literature. This paper o§ers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics. We fully characterize optimal tax parameters for the cases in which budget sets are convex...

We exploit a brief period of asymmetric information during the implementation of Pennsylvania’s “report card” scheme for coronary artery bypass graft surgery to test for improvements in quality of care and selection of patients by health care providers. During the ?rst three years of the...