Inclusion of means testing into age pension programs allows governments to better direct benefits to those most in need and to control funding costs by providing flexibility to control the participation rate (extensive margin) and the benefit level (intensive margin). The former is aimed at...

This paper compares the effects of immigration flows on economic outcomes and crime levels to the public opinion about these effects using individual and regional data for Australia. We employ an instrumental variables strategy to account for non-random location choices of immigrants and find...

We consider risk-averse individuals who differ in two characteristics - ability to benefit from education and inherited wealth - and analyze higher education participation under two alternative financing schemes - tax subsidy and (risk-sharing) income-contingent loans. With decreasing absolute...

We estimate the average return to education and the ability bias applying a parametric model of intra-household correlation suggested by Card (1999, 2001) to the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. Using the subsample of dual-earner households, we obtain an average return...

In contrast to Aryal, Perrigne and Vuong (2009), this note shows that in an insurance model with multidimensional screening when only information on whether the insuree has been involved in some accident is available, the joint distribution of risk and risk aversion is not identified.

Water is a classic common pool resource, especially during drought. This paper studies the impact of changing storage levels on urban water usage in the context of a prolonged drought and an extensive public information campaign which emphasized communal responsibility for maintaining ‘dam...

We study optimal redistributive taxes when individuals differ in two characteristics - earning ability and leisure needs - assumed to be imperfectly correlated. Individuals have private information about their abilities but needs are observable. With two different levels of observable needs the...

We discuss stability of discrete-time Markov chains satisfying monotonicity and an order-theoretic mixing condition that can be seen as an alternative to irreducibility. A chain satisfying these conditions has at most one stationary distribution. Moreover, if there is a stationary distribution,...

In applied density estimation problems, one often has data not only on the target variable, but also on a collection of covariates. In this paper, we study a density estimator that incorporates this additional information by combining parametric estimation and conditional Monte Carlo. We prove...

Infrastructure, as it impacts transport costs, is crucial in determining equilibrium outcomes in spatial competition; however, infrastructure investment is typically exogenous. Our political economy analysis of infrastructure choice is based upon consumer preferences derived from Salop’s...