The geological and climatic conditions of the Australian continent have made Australia a heterogeneous monetary union. Manufacturing and service industries are located in the population centers in the temperate southeast, and mining and pastoral activities take place in the vast expanses of the...

Dynamic optimization is widely used in financial economics, macroeconomics and resource economics. This is accounting for some tension between the undergraduate and graduate teaching of economics because most undergraduate programs still concentrate on static economic analysis. This paper shows...

This edition of the Australian Journal of Labour Economics contains a small subset of the papers that were presented at the December 2007 Australian Labour Market Research Workshop held in Perth, embracing a wide range of topics within labour economics. They are predominantly of an applied...

During his honours research on an index of industrial production at the University of Western Australia, Salter gained an understanding of the composite commodity theorem. The applied work on the index of industrial production provided him with the analytic foundations for his two famous...

In early monetary systems the unit of account was separate from the medium of exchange. Commodity prices and prices of coins were quoted in terms of a fixed quantity of metal that was embodied by an 'index coin'. Coins circulated at their metal value because coinage was imperfect and fixed...

Contracts for future delivery of commodities spread from Mesopotamia to Hellenistic Egypt and the Roman world. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, contracts for future delivery continued to be used in the Byzantine Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and they survived in canon law in western...

From the early 1960s onwards, Arnold Zellner has been publishing influential papers in the areas of statistical theory, econometric applications and macroeconomic modelling. This conversation canvasses Zellner’s transition from physics to economics, the reason for the renewal of interest in...

Currency competition provided a stable monetary standard in those Swiss cantons that deregulated their financial systems after liberal revolutions in the 1830s and 1940s. The Swiss currency issuers' concern with purchasing power stability suggests that each of them faced a real demand for notes...

Purpose – In Australia broadacre crops can be insured against hail and fire damage and some other perils but not against losses caused by drought, flood or frost. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the private provision of crop insurance in Western Australia....