Maintaining an open economy within certain bounds on inflation, output gap and exchange rate can help sustainable economic development. Macroeconomics proposes monetary-policy models that describe evolution of the above quantities. We use one such model, constituted by a four-metastate...

I consider the problem of water usage, developing a model to analyze the optimal pricing of water within a second-best economy. Consumers are assumed to have two main needs for water|drinking and non-drinking. Water is also used to produce food: The agricultural sector has a derived demand for...

We estimate the impact of private hospital insurance on utilization of hospital care services in Australia. We employ the two-stage residual inclusion approach to address the endogeneity of private insurance. We calculate moral hazard based on a difference-of-means estimator. Our three-stage...

A direct approach is taken to modelling New Zealand electricity prices, in which extreme value theory is used to augment a basic time series model. Despite its simplicity, the resulting model is suitable for answering fundamental questions of interest to risk managers, who might not find it...

We study a newly constructed panel data set of relative prices for a large number of consumer goods among 31 European countries over a 15 year period. The data set includes eurozone members both before and after the inception of the euro, floating exchange rate countries of western Europe, and...

We use unobserved components methodology to establish an Australasian common cycle, and assess the extent to which region-specific cycles of Australian States and New Zealand are additionally important. West Australian and New Zealand region-specific growth cycles have exhibited distinctively...

Empirical studies of the role of non-cognitive skills in driving economic behavior often rely heavily on the assumption that these skills are stable over the relevant time frame. We analyze the change in a specific non-cognitive skill, i.e. locus of control, in order to directly assess the...

Consider a lump-sum pension fund problem, in which an agent deposits an amount with a fund manager up front and is later repaid a lump sum x(T) after time T. The fund manager may be both cautious in seeking a payoff x(T) meeting a certain target, but relaxed toward the possibility of exceeding...

We study a newly released data set of scanner prices for food products in a large Swiss online supermarket. We find that average prices change about every two months, but when we exclude temporary sales, prices are extremely sticky, changing on average once every three years. Non-sale price...

In many countries, current water-pricing policies are dictated by the sole objective of breaking-even in each period. This results in large withdrawals, which are not sustainable in the long-run, hence not optimal. In this paper, I derive the optimal dynamic water resource management policy of a...