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...

Market failure exists in the provision of residential aged care services in Australia due to imperfection of competition that arises out of government actions. The Commonwealth Government has the exclusive right to grant provider rights and control over the number of beds that will be funded to...

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...

In the literature, two important views concerning the conduct of monetary policy are construed. One view is that the central banks’ monetary policy must be credible if the authorities want to curb inflation. A second view is that central banks set their monetary policy by using all the...

One of the enduring linkages between financial markets and the real economy is that the shape of the interest rate curve is seen as a good predictor of future output growth. However, little is known about the effect of globalisation on this relationship. This paper examines whether, in the wake...

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....