To help maintain price stability in New Zealand a countercyclical use of the goods and services tax (GST) has been proposed. This paper argues that a variable GST rate is unlikely to be a useful stabilisation tool for monetary policy. It first discusses some of the problems that would arise with...

This paper poses a multivariate test for contagion that distinguishes between vulnerability, positive and negative contagion. The model proides a time series of contagion with which the existence, severity and significance of crisis periods can be endogenously determined. Eleven stock markets...

In this paper we study the corrective role of income taxation in a model with the Gul and Pesendorfer type of temptation and self-control preferences embedded with labor/leisure choice. “Excessive” impatience created by the presence of temptation in preferences causes a bias in favour of...

We develop a signalling-game theoretical model to study a policy that publicly reports hospital waiting times. We characterize two effects of such a policy: the "competition effect" that drives hospitals to compete for patients by increasing service rates and reducing waiting times, and the...

This paper uses data from the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to study the returns to language skills of child and adult migrants in the US labor market. We employ an instrumental variable strategy, which exploits differences in language acquisition profiles between immigrants from English-...

We analyzed the market for indivisible, pure status goods. Firms produce and sell different brands of pure status goods to a population that is willing to signal individual abilities to potential matches in another population. Individual status is determined by the most expensive status good one...

In this paper we estimate the causal impacts of disability onset on labour market outcomes up to four years after onset using longitudinal data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) survey and difference-in-difference propensity score matching techniques. We find...

A partitional model of knowledge is monotonic if there exists a linear order on the state space such that, for every player, each element of her partition contains only a sequence of consecutive states. In monotonic models, the absence of alternating cycles is equivalent to the property that,...

Estimation in models with endogeneity concerns typically begins by searching for instruments. This search is inherently subjective and identification is generally achieved upon imposing the researcher's strong prior belief that such variables have no conditional impacts on the outcome. Results...

This paper proposes a possible explanation for uniform pricing in the recorded music industry, based on a pooling equilibrium across different quality types. We show that an ex ante ability to invest in the probability of success - which we identify with record companies' A&R expenditures -...