In the history of Burma's political economy, few groups have been so roundly vilified as the Chettiars. A community of moneylenders indigenous to Chettinad, Tamil Nadu, the Chettiars operated throughout the Southeast Asian territories of the British Empire. They played a particularly prominent...

The use of principal component techniques to estimate approximate factor models with large cross-sectional dimension is now well established. However, recent work by Inklaar, Jacobs and Romp (2003) and Boivin and Ng (2005) has cast some doubt on the importance of a large cross-sectional...

A portfolio of small capitalization stocks formed from securities listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) fails to adjust to market-wide news instantaneously and displays a significant amount of predictability from lagged returns on large and medium size firms. Despite apparently large...

In late 2003 and early 2004 the Economic Society of Australia surveyed the Heads of Economics Departments in Australia to determine their views on three main issues: student standards, major factors affecting these standards, and policy implications. This paper describes the main results of the...

We consider the contribution of sectoral shocks to post-war US unemployment movements in a dynamic factor framework. Whereas previously published estimates of the contribution of sectoral shocks to unemployment relate to a particular theory of unemployment, our approach is sufficiently general...

The last twenty five years provided international investors in sovereign bonds of emerging market countries with a colourful experience consisting of several defaults that resulted in protracted, frustrating and – most importantly – costly salvage operations. It therefore appears natural to...

Only 19 per cent of academic staff in the Economics Department at Macquarie University are women, a proportion that has not improved over the last decade. We investigate the reasons for this gender imbalance, focusing particularly on why it is that few qualified women have applied for positions....

This research takes the analysis of the relationship between energy and income in a different direction than prior research, and it introduces a new set of analytical tools to the area. The results of our research are important because they raise additional questions about the effectiveness of...

The paper analyzes some of the ingredients of currency hedging and portfolio construction against the framework of mean-variance efficient portfolios. The currency hedging analysis is based on a range of exchange rates, consisting of the domestic dollar vis-à-vis the US dollar, the euro, the...

We investigate to what extent reciprocity, exhibited by employers and employees, lead to stable gift exchange practices in the labour contract, giving rise to non-compensating wage differentials among industries and firms. We use the concept of Sequential Reciprocity Equilibrium (Dufwenberg and...