More than half of the world's old live in Asia, and around 35% in India and China alone. As demographic transition proceeds regionally and globally, the development of a robust and reliable longevity insurance market will become essential. Although the need for such insurance is most pressing in...

This paper tests the response of bond yield spreads and equity prices to credit rating changes in the Australian financial market. Unlike some earlier studies for foreign markets, we find evidence that both yield spreads and equity prices move in the ‘expected’ direction following rating...

The prospect of a common currency for Australia and New Zealand has been canvassed by senior poli-ticians and bureaucrats, and has been the subject of academic debate. According to Mundell (1961), a high degree of internal labour mobility is a desirable feature of currency unions. This study...

This paper has two related purposes. The first is to bring together and review a number of earlier studies which have attempted to estimate the value of Australia’s privately held wealth stock. The second is to present new estimates covering the 1980s, based partly on these earlier studies,...

A central issue in the analysis of public goods is the relationship between the optimal provision level and the distribution of income. Theoretical research has stressed the conditions under which the optimum is independent of the distribution of income. Here we focus on numerical analysis of...

We exploit a comprehensive restructuring of the early retirement system in Norway in 2011 to examine labor supply responses to alternative pension reform strategies relying on improved work incentives (flexibility) or increased access ages (prescription), respectively. We find that increasing...