Family income decile
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Coalition proposal
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ALP proposal (excl [...]
Number of comments: 12 Every now and then, some crazy economist will come along and argue that if we really want to limit water use, we should scrap quantity controls, put up the price, and compensate low-income households.
Of course, this only works if household demand responds to the water price. If what the [...]
Number of comments: 11 When I was a kid, every bicycle store and department store used to sell AM/FM radios that could be mounted on bicycle handlebars. Since I have a half-hour cycle to and fro work each day, I’d rather like to be able to listen to the news. But for some reason [...]
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Number of comments: 11 Ezra Klein is having a bit of fun with Rudy Giuliani’s assertion that the U.S. “will be to the left of France” if the American electorate is “not careful” and doesn’t elect him:
We could elect Dennis Kucinich and 10 more Democratic senators and we wouldn’t get anywhere near [...]
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Number of comments: 11 I somehow managed to miss this very interesting piece by Simon Jackman in the Bulletin, showing that there’s a systematic bias in the Australian electoral system against Labor, such that they typically need 51-52% of the two-party vote to win government.
Simon only slightly alludes to this, but naturally, one [...]
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Number of comments: 10 Several friends and journalists have been asking me lately about the fact that the headline betting odds have Labor a 70% chance to win, while the seat-by-seat markets have Labor as favourite in 77 out of 150 seats (see Simon Jackman’s site for current and past odds). As I see it, there are [...]
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Number of comments: 10 A couple of weeks ago, Labor announced that it would offer the poorest 2/3rds of parents an education rebate worth $375 per primary school child, and $750 per secondary school child. Now, the Coalition has hit back with an offer of $400 per primary school child, and $800 per [...]
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Number of comments: 10 It’s been a slow election for open letters and political advertising from worthies, but things have picked up in the last few days. In The Weekend Australian, there was an ad from Doctors for the Environment Australia about, you guessed it, climate change. Last election it was doctors’ wives [...]
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Number of comments: 10 For the last few days, I have been dipping into The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics, edited by Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts. It contains over 400 entries on a wide range of Australian political topics. Many of the contributors are good choices: Ian Hancock on the Liberal Party, [...]
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Number of comments: 10 In his publication Is the Middle Class Shrinking?, Clive Hamilton writes ‘there does not seem to be any survey evidence on identification with class terms’. We all know Clive is no ordinary leftist, but it is remarkable that he became a leading ‘progressive’ thinker despite clearly having read [...]
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Number of comments: 10 It is perhaps too early to conclude that Bernanke is facing a death spiral, but it would appear that he is confronted with the proverbial Hobson’s choice – inflate or die. With stocks still in overvalued territory and bonds looking equally toppish, this points to gold (although overextended in the [...]
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Number of comments: 10 Evidence this morning adding to what we already have that the economy is neither the electoral asset nor the electoral liability it once was, and that interest rates are not a major political issue.
A Galaxy Poll reported in the News Ltd tabloids asked
If interest rates rise [...]
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Number of comments: 10 For all the fuss in the voluntary student unionism debate during 2005, there has been very little follow-up on its consequences. The first sector-wide study of VSU’s impact (which will be available from the Australian University Sport website on 7 November) is reported this morning.
It finds the [...]
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Number of comments: 10 I somehow neglected to write a post on Jennifer Buckingham’s new CIS childcare report when it came out last week.* The report surveys the evidence on child care, and concludes that we have very little high-quality evidence on whether formal childcare is good or bad for kids. Much more [...]
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Number of comments: 10 Back in July, I defended the use of the term ‘bullshitting’ in the Harry Frankfurt sense, as connotating that the speaker is indifferent to whether or not he or she is saying is true or meaningful. When politicians have to parrot the party line or offer insincere pleasantries at [...]
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Number of comments: 10 The Australian’s Higher Education Supplement asked me to write a short piece on the issue of university efficiency, which appears here.
People who read this blog will already know my views on trends in administration costs. But in the HES version I pick up on this report [...]
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Number of comments: 10 Following on from my post on the latest ABS births data, I just noticed an amusing fact. The reason for the apparent ‘growth’ in fertility isn’t because the 2006 figure is high, it’s because they revised down their 2005 figure.
From the ABS’s October 2006 media release:
Australia’s total fertility [...]
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Number of comments: 10 Once there used to be a royal ‘we’ - the word ‘we’ used to mean ‘I’, as in Queen Victoria’s ‘we are not amused’. These days royals almost never say ‘we’ unless they mean ‘we’. The current British monarch doesn’t even always use ‘we’ when she could. In a phrase [...]
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Number of comments: 10 John Buchanan may live in fear of a Joe Hockey put-down. But not all academics are so shy of taking on politicians. Take Roger Short, a (gasp) Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. According to The Australian, this week he told undergraduate students that:
Australia’s population will [...]
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Number of comments: 10 On the evening of Monday 1 October, Age journalist Michael Bachelard rang the office of Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey. The call was about a report neither Hockey nor his staff had seen, Australia@Work. Bachelard explained some findings on pay under AWAs. With a deadline approaching, Hockey’s office hurriedly [...]
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Number of comments: 10 As The Australian reports this morning, the Quadrant editorial vacancy has been filled - by controversial historian Keith Windschuttle.
Windschuttle’s first target will be the arts:
Windschuttle is not feeling charitable towards luvvies. “I’ve become concerned in recent years about the cynicism and decadence that you get in [...]
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Number of comments: 10 Over at his blog, Andrew Leigh asks whether the OECD was right not to count an implicit subsidy in HECS-HELP in its figures on how much the federal government spends on higher education. The federal goverrnment argues that because the OECD only counts direct subsidy paid to higher [...]
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Number of comments: 10 A Galaxy Poll in November last year found that only 33% of NSW voters thought that, based on its recent performance, the ALP deserved to win the forthcoming NSW election, but that nevertheless on a two-party preferred basis 52% of them planned to vote for it (which turned out to [...]
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Number of comments: 10 I only lasted about half an hour with last night’s debate, but early on Kevin Rudd repeated his claim that people are feeling worse off due to rising costs, and the worm climbed to the top of the screen as he did so.
Is this a case of the [...]
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Number of comments: 10 Though there are signs that tax cuts are coming back into public favour, two polls published this morning suggest that this is more due to the politics of massive surpluses, which allow tax cuts and more spending, than to a shift back to preferring tax cuts over more public [...]
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Number of comments: 10 This week’s edition of the Health Wonk Review is overflowing with useful information. Can there be too much of a good thing, you ask? Well for those of you who don’t have the time to read every article in this week’s HWR edition, I’ve narrowed [...]
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Number of comments: 10 For weeks now we’ve been hearing complaints about the level of government advertising, much of it on the changes to WorkChoices. It isn’t having any obvious effect on the two-party preferred. But today’s Newspoll issues survey (pdf) suggests that it is perhaps having some impact.
On the question of [...]
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Number of comments: 10 It’s not yet mentioned on their website, but an e-mail over the weekend announced that libertarian bookseller Laissez Faire Books is closing down. As they explain it:
The book market has changed tremendously over the past 30+ years, and it has gotten harder and harder for a small niche bookseller [...]
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Number of comments: 10 | David Hoopes |
Many people make incorrect assumptions about capitalism. Some would have us believe that capitalism is based on greed, selfishness, and promotes behavior that is completely self-centered. This is a common interpretation of Smith’s advice to allow people to make decisions based on self-interest. Examples are easy to [...]
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Number of comments: 10 According to media reports, the Coalition has announced nearly $10 billion in new spending since the May Budget. But will it announce tax cuts during the campaign?
The political case for doing so is strong. The ACNielsen poll on Monday added to the accumulating evidence that tax cuts [...]
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Number of comments: 10 Students of Economics have come across the ‘Veblen Effect’ while learning about the exceptions to the law of demand. The law of demand that ‘other things remaining the same, the demand for goods increased when price fell and vice versa.’ Veblen said that when prices of certain goods rose, their [...]
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Number of comments: 10 This article tries to show that high rates of GDP in India need not trickle down to the rest of the masses and also strives to explain why ‘segregated growth’ further fuels inequality. By ‘segregated growth’, I refer to growth which takes place in sectors which employ relatively a small [...]
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Number of comments: 9 According to the NYT, the US army is carrying out randomised experiments on trauma treatments. Their rationale is that with a lot of soldiers dying in Iraq, it’s worth running experiments now to save lives in the future.
A similar ethical argument is often made to justify randomised policy trials: getting [...]
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Number of comments: 9 According to Simon Jackman’s aggregation of three bookmakers, the betting markets were suggesting a 56% chance of an ALP win on Sunday, and a 60% chance on Monday. Since the only real news in that period was the election debate, this not only implies that the markets think Rudd [...]
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Number of comments: 9 During the week, the relentlessly on-message Kevin Rudd repeated his lines about ‘working families’:
The other big challenge is offering help to working families under financial pressure. Mr Howard just said he understood that, well that’s the same Mr Howard who said that working families had never been better off.
And [...]
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Number of comments: 9 The essence of Economics or Political Economy as it was called earlier (According to Adam Smith) was to provide a good livelihood for the people and also to bring in money for the state. Nowadays, economics has got lot many divisions and specialities, that I feel the essence is getting [...]
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Number of comments: 8 ABS births data out yesterday show another increase in fertility - from 1.79 babies per woman in 2005 to 1.81 in 2006. In the midst of an election campaign, the question naturally arises: how much credit can the baby bonus take for this increase?
I’m not aware of anyone who’s [...]
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Number of comments: 8 In responding to a Group of Eight whinge about university funding, Julie Bishop alleged:
“There has been huge growth in the cost of university administration and, given their strong financial position, the challenge for university management is to ensure their institutions are operating more efficiently and to invest more [...]
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Number of comments: 8 Newspapers are never at their best in campaign mode. Today’s Age leads with a story headed ‘Judge savages Andrews’. The article begins:
A FEDERAL Court judge has launched an extraordinary attack on Kevin Andrews over the involuntary removal of a man to New Zealand, claiming the Immigration Minister’s behaviour had [...]
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Number of comments: 8 The following three maps will show us that, though the spending in health by the private sector is comparatively much larger than the public sector, yet HIV prevalence is very high in India.
This shows the dire need for targeted public investment in health care. This is because private sector investment does not extend [...]
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Number of comments: 8 The conflicting ideologies in Economics have more or less revolved around mainly two institutions- Markets and Governments. The Capitalists believe ‘Markets’ to be the panacea for all economic problems, while the Socialists replace the ‘market’ with the ‘government’.
On Markets
Market is the institutional framework within which the act of exchange takes [...]
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Number of comments: 8 There is a consensus about the crisis which the Agricultural sector is facing in India. The contribution to GDP has been falling and it is under 20% of the GDP now. The sector provides employment to about 60% of the population. Most of the farmers under this sector fall under [...]
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Number of comments: 7 So you send a paper to a professor for a review. After months of constant pestering you don’t even get a reply. Eventually you give up and get the paper reviewed by someone else. Then, you receive a submission from said professor whose email apparently is working. What do you [...]
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Number of comments: 7 The activist business GetUp! is running an unusual three-party election ad. It features Greens leader Bob Brown, Democrats leader Lyn Allison, and Labor Senator Kate Lundy under the banner ‘Save Our Senate’. You can watch the ad on their site, but its message is that to restore balance [...]
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Number of comments: 7 What happens to kids’ school performance if their parent becomes unemployed? According to a new study from Norway, the answer depends on whether it’s mum or dad. They use plant closings rather than all job losses, since economists generally think that having your firm shut down is more exogenous (ie. more [...]
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Number of comments: 7 According to Peter Hartcher, markets currently put a 50% probability on the RBA raising rates at its 6 Nov meeting. And not surprisingly, many commentators are predicting that the Coalition’s tax cut package will increase that probability; though the effect of tax cuts starting on 1 July 2008 and [...]
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Number of comments: 7 One of the things that’s generally known about Germany, but not often spoken about for various reasons(1), is how much continuity there was between the Third Reich and the early days of the Federal Republic. A certain degree of continuity is inevtiable any time a government changes; even the [...]
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Number of comments: 6 The Australian Fabians are running a young writers’ competition, for those aged 18-28. First prize is a trip to London, to work in the thinktank Demos for a month. Second prize is the chance to intern at Demos Australia (aka Per Capita). Entries close 10 December. Details over [...]
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Number of comments: 6 This regular weekly article highlights some memorable / thought-provoking quotes from market commentators during the past week, and briefly reviews the week’s market action on the basis of economic statistics and a performance chart. [...]
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Number of comments: 6 The WorkChoices campaign - for and against - must be the most expensive in Australian political history. But how effective was it?
Last month I argued that perhaps the government’s ‘fairness’ test change and subsequent advertising helped ease concerns among Liberal voters. But the polling data I have been analysing [...]
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Number of comments: 6 A story on The Age website this afternoon, referring to the release of the ABS birth statistics for 2006, is headlined ‘New figures reveal our baby boom’. It reports:
Australian Bureau of Statistics data released today showed that 265,900 births were registered in 2006, the second highest since the [...]
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Number of comments: 6 In a sole-authored paper, David Galenson thinks he has some ideas…
Co-Authoring Advanced Art
The joint production of paintings by more than one artist was not uncommon in the past: a number of Old Masters had assistants do much of the work on their paintings, executing images that had been [...]
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Number of comments: 6 What you see may not be what you get as far as the recent surge in US stocks goes. Irrespective of various stock market indices hitting new highs, the so-called market internals remain weak. This refers to the lack of market breadth and low volume being causes for concern as [...]
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Number of comments: 6 Josh Marshall, on Obama and the presidency:
Obama isn’t so much running for the nomination in the sense of reaching out and taking it. He’s trying to show us how marvelous he is (and this isn’t snark, he’s really pretty marvelous) so that Democratic voters will recognize it and [...]
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Number of comments: 5 I recently experienced my own little frustration with getting information out of the government. I’m writing a CIS paper on private providers of higher education, and one of the arguments I planned to make was that the FEE-HELP provisions of the Higher Education Support Act 2003 are protectionist, in [...]
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Number of comments: 5 So this report states that the PM may lose his seat. On a two party preferred basis, the Liberals are at 48 percent and Labor at 52 percent. This is itself an compound statistic because it includes a rule based assumption on preference distribution. Anyhow, let’s take it at [...]
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Number of comments: 5 | Nicolai Foss |
I just spent three days in London. Jolly, indeed. Before going to the London Business School yesterday, where I had a paper expertly demolished and teared apart by Michael Jacobides, I visited for the first, but certainly not last, time the Science Museum on Exhibition Road. [...]
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Number of comments: 5 Labor and the commentariat are very excited about interest rates - what with a broken promise to keep them low and the possibility of rates going up during a campaign. But as with household finances generally, do the voters have a sense of perspective that the political class lacks?
Back [...]
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Number of comments: 5 The Canberra Times today reports on a poll of 400 voters in the bellweather seat of Eden Monaro. When asked whether they prefer $34b to be devoted to tax cuts or health/education, 10% say tax cuts, while 88% say spending. As Peter Martin points out in an accompanying commentary, [...]
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Number of comments: 5 The ghost of Robert Menzies has yet again been sent to haunt to the modern Liberal Party, this time by Canberra Times economics editor Peter Martin. The target is usually John Howard, but this time it is Peter Costello. In response to the Treasurer’s efforts this last week to heavy [...]
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Number of comments: 5 I’ve had several reports now, most recently from Boris, that my blog is being blocked by work web filters as being a sex site. Websense is at least one of the culprits.
Though I realise it is going to be hard for employees to complain that they are not [...]
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Number of comments: 5 | Peter Klein |
When the quantity demanded exceeds the quantity supplied — causing shortages, delays, congestion, misallocation — the solution is to raise the price. Every freshman economics student knows this. Why, then, are regulators, industry groups, and consumer representatives so often opposed to rationing by the price mechanism? Is it [...]
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Number of comments: 5 Jean Quatremer claims that the exit polls are showing the Civic Forum 10 points ahead of the Kaczynski Kidz; which could mean a knockout win.
More, as they say, as we get it.
Update, 2351GMT: Hell yeah. Jaroslaw Kaczynski has admitted defeat; Civic Forum coming in with a wet sail. [...]
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Number of comments: 5 | Peter Klein |
I haven’t blogged much on the Comparative Organizations conference hosted by Dave Whetten, Teppo Felin, and Brayden King. It was a terrific conference and I enjoyed myself very much but, as the lone economist in a group dominated by sociologists, I found the experience a little disorienting. [...]
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Number of comments: 5 | David Hoopes |
So, my last use of the word noble was a typo, but I left it in case someone might think I’m clever.
Am I the only one who finds Vice President Gore’s prize to be a trifle disturbing?
Former guest blogger extrodinaire Steve Postrel’s post “Taxes al Carbon” raised [...]
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Number of comments: 5 Economics has been getting more mathematical with the passage of time. Students opt for maximum papers in mathematics so that they can remain competitive academically at the international level.
Stark inequalities are present in the syllabi within India. In the South, the undergraduate degree does not lay much of emphasis on [...]
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Number of comments: 4 Market sentiment did an about-turn last week as uncertainty mounted on the back of the credit situation going from bad to worse. The deteriorating outlook resulted in a reassessment of risk as evidenced by the continued appreciation of the Japanese yen as investors unwind their carry trades, triggering the liquidation [...]
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Number of comments: 4 This regular weekly article highlights some memorable / thought-provoking quotes from market commentators during the past week, and briefly reviews the week’s market action on the basis of economic statistics and a few performance charts. [...]
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Number of comments: 4 The Howard Government today announced the beginning of its ‘KnotChoices’ campaign, aimed at getting all Australians to wear a tie to work. Launching the television advertisements, Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey said “the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ latest data figures suggest people on average are earning, while wearing a [...]
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Number of comments: 4 We can all probably agree that Italy’s fit of xenophobia towards Romanians is pretty bad, but it has had one positive consequence; ITS, the extreme-right/nationalist grouping in the European Parliament whose membership can be summed up as “if you want to make some minority unwelcome and you’re in [...]
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Number of comments: 4 On page 10 of today’s Age, my ‘verdict’ on the Treasurer’s debate is given alongside other economists. Here is what I said:
WHO WON?
Wayne Swan
THE BEST MOMENT FOR COSTELLO?
When he gave credit to the previous Labor government for deregulating home mortgage interest rates and reducing tariffs.
THE BEST MOMENT FOR SWAN?
In calling [...]
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Number of comments: 4 | Peter Klein |
You know the old adage: If you can, do; if you can’t, teach. Is it true for business?
A paper in the August 2007 Academy of Management Perspectives, “Do Business School Professors Make Good Executive Managers?” by Bin Jiang and Patrick Murphy (full text; abstract; press release), identifies [...]
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Number of comments: 4 Speaking of talented up and coming Australian political scientists, Melbourne University’s Sally Young (with assistance from researchers Stephanie Younane and Mary Helen McIlroy) has just launched “Soapbox“, an archive of election material running back to federation. Browsing through the launch speeches, I’m struck by the fact that in [...]
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Number of comments: 4 I have a piece in Crikey today on Labor’s child care rebate policy [over the fold].
(more…) [...]
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Number of comments: 4 I don’t think I have ever blegged before. (Blegging is when a blogger asks reader for help with something). However, this seemed an opportune time.
We are currently revising our first year undergraduate textbook, Principles of Economics for a 4th edition in 2008. We like to include articles — usually op [...]
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Number of comments: 4 With the politics of capital punishment in the news lately, I thought I’d blog on three interesting pieces of work that have crossed my desk.
Realists: In new ARC-funded (but not endorsed!) research, Sinclair Davidson and Tim Fry analyse the Australian Election Study, and show a strong correlation between rating [...]
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Number of comments: 4 | Peter Klein |
I’ve been asked a few times today what I think of the Nobel Prize to Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson for mechanism design. (And, more than once, “What the heck is mechanism design?”) Briefly, mechanism design is the study of rules or contracts (”mechanisms”) that give agents [...]
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Number of comments: 4 The election is going to take place on the 24th November. I think I share the collective mood of the nation when I say, “it’s not this weekend?” After all, the campaign has been going on for most of this year. We know the policies, we know the people. Why [...]
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Number of comments: 4 | Peter Klein |
As a professor, you never know how much influence you have. Sometimes you hear from former students, years later, thanking you for some remark you made in class, for challenging or inspiring them, for helping them see things in a different way. (You rarely hear from the [...]
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Number of comments: 4 It’s always good to see reasoned debate in our nation’s broadsheets. And then there’s articles like this one, by political scientist John Keane.
Our world is more complex than a novel, but Seeing should open our eyes to the rise of organised opposition to democracy in the early years of [...]
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Number of comments: 4 My friend Macgregor points me to this extraordinarily moving article by Christopher Hitchens. If you’re as lachrymose as me, I don’t recommend reading it at work.
[...]
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Number of comments: 4 This test has been going around; literally. Try it out. I saw it as clockwise (and struggled to get it to go the other way) meaning that I use more of the right side of the brain; not a typical stereotype for an economist. [...]
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Number of comments: 4 This post is the first in the series- On Neoclassical Economics. This series attempts to look at the basic concepts of Neoclassicalism or Marginalism. The concepts that this series will cover are that of man being rational, measurement of utility, equilibrium from demand and supply, Micro and Macro economics and [...]
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Number of comments: 4 Four persons A, B, C and D have to share Rs 4 among themselves in units of one rupee. First A proposes a distribution and all of them, including A vote on it. If at least 50% of those voting agree with A, the proposal is accepted. If not, A [...]
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Number of comments: 3 The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research - definitely the best state or territory crime body in the country - is planning to provide people with precise details on where crimes occur (report here, data here). It looks like the system may be based on the successful New [...]
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Number of comments: 3 In the Australian today, Bernard Lane profiles my coauthor, Joshua Gans — recent winner of the Economic Society of Australia’s inaugural young economist award. My favourite bit:
Any time for hobbies?
“I pride myself on spending more than the typical amount of time with my children,” Gans says.
“I think sometimes people don’t [...]
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