This paper presents an analytical framework for examining changes in the Private Health Insurance rebate (PHIR) and the Medicare Levy Surcharge (MLS), and uses it to establish three key propositions. First, increases in the MLS rate tend to reduce the elasticity of demand for private health...

Assets with a value of over $130billion are regulated in Australia. We define regulatory risk as being regulation that increases the cost of servicing this capital and analyse the sources of this risk. We show that unbiased and symmetric errors will generally create asymmetric risk for the firm,...

The Minerals Resources Rent Tax (MRRT) is intended to tax the rents properly attributed to minerals at the time and place of their extraction, i.e. at the mouth of the mine. However, mining operations involve a degree of vertical integration that in some cases extends from mine to port. We...

Next generation access networks (NGANs) are in many cases likely to be supplied by vertically integrated firms, that is, firms that both wholesale access and sell services downstream to end-users. A long standing concern of regulators is that such firms may engage in anti-competitive price...

Do some countries innovate more than others? If so, why? And once the reasons behind these differences in performances are set out, what policy options do they imply? This paper explores these questions including 'inventiveness' in the broad definition of 'innovation' to provide a basis for...