Agarwal, R, Bajada, C, Brown, PJ & Green, R 2018, 'Managerial Practices in a High Cost Manufacturing Environment' in Khosrow-Pour, M (ed), Operations and Service Management, IGI Global, USA, pp. 1749-1768.
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This chapter explores the management strategies adopted by manufacturing firms operating in high versus low cost economies and investigates the reasons for differences in the management practice choices. The study reported in this chapter identifies a subset of countries that have either high or low labour costs, with USA, Sweden, and Japan being high, and India, China, and Brazil being low labour cost economies. The high labour cost manufacturing firms are found to have better management practices. In this chapter, the authors find that Australia and New Zealand manufacturing firms face relatively high labour cost but lag behind world best practice in management performance. The chapter concludes by highlighting the need for improvement in management capability for Australian and New Zealand manufacturing firms if they are to experience a reinvigoration of productivity, competitiveness, and long-term growth.
Baddeley, M 2018, 'Financial Instability and Speculative Bubbles: Behavioural Insights and Policy Implications' in Alternative Approaches in Macroeconomics, Springer International Publishing, pp. 209-234.
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© The Author(s) 2018. Michelle Baddeley in this chapter entitled, ‘Financial Instability and Speculative Bubbles: Behavioural Insights and Policy Implications’, draws on themes from Baddeley and McCombie’s (An historical perspective on speculative bubbles and financial crises: Tulipmania and the South Sea bubble. In: Arestis P, Baddeley M, McCombie JSL (eds) What global economic crisis? Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2001) exploration of speculative bubbles, which applied different models of speculation to analysing famous historical speculative episodes, specifically Tulipmania and the South Sea Bubble. This chapter re-assesses these insights in the light of all that has happened during the US sub-prime mortgage crisis and subsequent global financial crises of 2007/2008. It also extends the analysis to include new insights from behavioural finance about the nature and causes of speculative bubbles, blending insights from behavioural finance and post-Keynesian economics. Speculative bubbles throughout history have a number of common, predictable features so why have we not learnt more from these past experiences? In answering these questions, this chapter concludes with an analysis of policy implications-including fiscal and monetary measures that could be implemented to minimise the destabilising real-side impacts from speculative bubbles and the financial shocks and crises which often follow.
Brown, PJ & Bajada, C 2018, 'An economic model of circular supply network dynamics: Toward an understanding of performance measurement in the context of multiple stakeholders', Business Strategy and the Environment, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 643-655.
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AbstractThe circular economy (CE) is increasingly being seen as a way in which organizations and economies can become environmentally sustainable. In this context, a key challenge facing multiple‐stakeholder collaborations in circular supply networks (CSNs) is the need to coordinate activities, as well as to monitor and benchmark sustainability performance. The limited formal analysis of CE production dynamics and performance indicators of activities in the CSN has contributed to these challenges. To address this we develop an economic model of material flow in a CSN that incorporates multiple stakeholder effects, and two novel performance indicators that: (i) estimate the joint effects of the speed of recycling, and the effectiveness of collection and conversion of recycled material on production; and (ii) a measure of the upper bound production possibilities for a given recyclable material cycling through a CSN. These indicators will be informative for monitoring, benchmarking and incentivizing performance across CSNs and informing public policy debates and strategies.
Buckley, NJ, Mestelman, S, Muller, RA, Schott, S & Zhang, J 2018, 'The Effects of Communication on the Partnership Solution to the Commons', Environmental and Resource Economics, vol. 70, no. 2, pp. 363-380.
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© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Organizing individual appropriators into output sharing groups has been found to effectively solve the tragedy of the commons problem. We experimentally investigate the robustness of this solution by introducing different channels of communication that naturally arise from group competitions. In the absence of communication, we confirm that output sharing can introduce sufficient free riding to offset over-harvesting and results in full efficiency. Allowing local communication within output-sharing groups substantially decreases this efficiency enhancement because it reduces free riding and boosts between-group competition. Yet the efficiency level is still significantly higher than that achieved when global communication is allowed among all appropriators in a conventional common pool resource without output sharing. The efficiency-reducing effect of local communication is mitigated when random partners instead of fixed partners are sharing output over time, and is nearly eliminated when random partners are formed with users who belong to different communication groups.
Delavande, A & Zafar, B 2018, 'Information and anti-American attitudes', Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 149, pp. 1-31.
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© 2018 Elsevier B.V. This paper investigates how attitudes towards the United States are affected by provision of information. We generate a “panel” of attitudes in urban Pakistan, in which respondents are randomly exposed to fact-based statements describing the US in either a positive or negative light. Anti-American sentiment is high and heterogenous in our sample at the baseline, and systematically correlated with intended behavior (such as intended migration to the US). We find that revised attitudes are significantly different from baseline attitudes: attitudes are, on average, revised upward (downward) upon receipt of positive (negative) information, indicating that providing information had a meaningful effect on US favorability. The within-subject design and data on respondents’ priors allows us to investigate the underlying mechanisms. We find that revisions are largely a result of salience-based updating. We reject unbiased information-based updating as the only source of revisions. In addition, a substantial proportion of individuals do not respond to the information. This heterogeneity in revision processes means that there is no convergence in attitudes following the provision of information.
Doiron, D & Kettlewell, N 2018, 'The Effect of Health Insurance on the Substitution between Public and Private Hospital Care', Economic Record, vol. 94, no. 305, pp. 135-154.
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Researchers have long been interested in estimating the causal effect of health insurance on health‐care utilisation. Less attention has been given to measuring the impact of insurance on the substitution between private and public sector care. We estimate this effect for hospital admissions in Australia. To identify causal effects we use household variables as instruments, namely, information on partner's health and family aspirations. We find that having private health insurance increases the probability of a hospital admission by 5–6 percentage points. This net effect is the result of a considerable substitution from public to private care, which has important policy implications.
Gainsbury, SM, Tobias-Webb, J & Slonim, R 2018, 'BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS AND GAMBLING: A NEW PARADIGM FOR APPROACHING HARM-MINIMIZATION', Gaming Law Review, vol. 22, no. 10, pp. 608-617.
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Garbarino, E, Slonim, R & Villeval, MC 2018, 'A method to estimate mean lying rates and their full distribution', Journal of the Economic Science Association, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 136-150.
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Goeree, JK, Louis, P & Zhang, J 2018, 'Noisy Introspection in the 11–20 Game', The Economic Journal, vol. 128, no. 611, pp. 1509-1530.
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© 2017 Royal Economic Society Previous experiments based on the 11–20 game have produced evidence for the level-k model with observed levels of strategic thinking consistently ranging from 0 to 3. Our baseline treatment uses the 11–20 game and replicates previous results. We apply four models of strategic thinking to the baseline-treatment data and use these to predict behaviour and beliefs in five other treatments that employ games with a very similar structure. The best predictive performance is achieved by models that incorporate ‘common knowledge of noise’. A model of noisy introspection, which does so, predicts behaviour remarkably well.
Goldbaum, D 2018, 'Conformity and Influence', B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, vol. 19, no. 1.
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I model the behavior of decision-makers seeking conformity and influence in a connected population. The model allows for one-sided linking, with information flowing from the target to the link’s originator. Conformity is achieved only with a social order, necessitating differentiated rewards despite ex ante homogeneity. The leader holds a strategic social location ex post, exerting influence independent of any leadership traits. A strong desire to influence produces non-conforming autonomous decision-makers. Socially detrimental multiple leaders can be sustained as well.
Hafalir, IE, Hakimov, R, Kübler, D & Kurino, M 2018, 'College admissions with entrance exams: Centralized versus decentralized', Journal of Economic Theory, vol. 176, pp. 886-934.
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Heinesen, E, Imai, S & Maruyama, S 2018, 'Employment, job skills and occupational mobility of cancer survivors', Journal of Health Economics, vol. 58, pp. 151-175.
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© 2018 The Authors Previous studies find significant negative effects of cancer on employment, with stronger effects for less-educated workers. We investigate whether the effect of cancer varies by skill requirement in the pre-cancer occupation, whether such heterogeneity can explain educational gradients, and whether cancer is associated with changes in job characteristics for cancer survivors who remain employed four years after the diagnosis. We combine Danish administrative registers with detailed skill requirement data and use individuals without cancer as a control group. Our main findings are the following: the negative effect of cancer on employment is stronger if the pre-cancer occupation requires high levels of manual skills or low levels of cognitive skills; the educational gradient diminishes substantially if we allow the effects of cancer to also depend on pre-cancer skill requirements; and cancer is not associated with occupational mobility, indicating potential for policies that reduce labour market frictions for cancer survivors.
Kettlewell, N, Stavrunova, O & Yerokhin, O 2018, 'Premium subsidies and demand for private health insurance: results from a regression discontinuity design', Applied Economics Letters, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 96-101.
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© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article investigates the impact of a private health insurance (PHI) subsidy on the demand for PHI in the context of the Australian health care system. In particular, we focus on the subpopulation of elderly Australians and exploit discontinuous increases to the universal ‘PHI rebate’ that occur when people turn 65 and 70 years. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find the policy has little effect on take-up of PHI and is best interpreted as a wealth transfer to elderly Australians who already have insurance.
Li, M & Scharth, M 2018, 'Leverage, asymmetry and heavy tails in the high-dimensional factor stochastic volatility model', Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 285-301.
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We develop a flexible modeling and estimation framework for a high-dimensional factor stochastic volatility (SV) model. Our specification allows for leverage effects, asymmetry and heavy tails across all systematic and idiosyncratic components of the model. This framework accounts for well-documented features of univariate financial time series, while introducing a flexible dependence structure that incorporates tail dependence and asymmetries such as stronger correlations following downturns. We develop an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for posterior simulation based on the particle Gibbs, ancestor sampling, and particle efficient importance sampling methods. We build computationally efficient model selection into our estimation framework to obtain parsimonious specifications in practice. We validate the performance of our proposed estimation method via extensive simulation studies for univariate and multivariate simulated datasets. An empirical study shows that the model outperforms other multivariate models in terms of value-at-risk evaluation and portfolio selection performance for a sample of US and Australian stocks.
Lindo, JM, Siminski, P & Swensen, ID 2018, 'College Party Culture and Sexual Assault', American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 236-265.
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This paper considers the degree to which events that intensify partying increase sexual assault. Estimates are based on panel data from campus and local law-enforcement agencies and an identification strategy that exploits plausibly random variation in the timing of Division 1 football games. The estimates indicate that these events increase daily reports of rape with 17-24 year old victims by 28 percent. The effects are driven largely by 17-24 year old offenders and by offenders unknown to the victim, but we also find significant effects on incidents involving offenders of other ages and on incidents involving offenders known to the victim.
Liu, B, Lu, J, Wang, R & Zhang, J 2018, 'Optimal prize allocation in contests: The role of negative prizes', Journal of Economic Theory, vol. 175, pp. 291-317.
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© 2018 In this paper, we analyze the role of negative prizes in contest design with a fixed budget, risk-neutral contestants, and independent private abilities. The effort-maximizing prize allocation rule features a threshold. When the highest effort is above the threshold, all contestants with lower efforts receive negative prizes. These negative prizes are used to augment the prize to the contestant with the highest effort, which better incentivizes contestants with higher abilities. When no contestant's effort exceeds the threshold, all contestants equally split the initial budget (or a portion of it) to ensure their participation. We find that allowing negative prizes can increase the expected total effort dramatically. In particular, if no bound is imposed on negative prizes, the expected total effort can be arbitrarily close to the highest possible effort inducible when all contestants have the maximum ability with certainty. The above contest is shown to be the optimal mechanism for a more general class of mechanisms.
Lu, QS, Pattnaik, C, Xiao, J & Voola, R 2018, 'Cross-national variation in consumers' retail channel selection in a multichannel environment: Evidence from Asia-Pacific countries', Journal of Business Research, vol. 86, pp. 321-332.
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© 2017 Elsevier Inc. This study examines the impact of cross-national variation in culture on the selection of retail channels in a multichannel environment in eight Asia-Pacific countries. In contrast to the prior literature, which examined the intention to purchase through online channels, we study the actual purchase decisions made by consumers by comparing online and telephone channels. We adopt Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov's (2010) six cultural dimensions (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, long vs. short-term orientation, and indulgence vs. restraint) to examine the impact of cross-national variation in culture on online vs. telephone retail channel selection. The empirical findings suggest that countries with high uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation are less likely to adopt online channels rather than telephone channels, whereas countries with high individualism, high masculinity, and high indulgence are more likely to adopt online channels. These findings highlight the importance of cross-nation al variation of culture on retail channel selection.
Maruyama, S & Nakamura, S 2018, 'Why are women slimmer than men in developed countries?', Economics & Human Biology, vol. 30, pp. 1-13.
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© 2018 Elsevier B.V. Women have a lower BMI than men in developed countries, yet the opposite is true in developing countries. We call this the gender BMI puzzle and investigate its underlying cause. We begin by studying time trends in Japan, where, consistent with the cross-country puzzle, the BMI of adult women has steadily decreased since the 1950s, whereas the BMI of adult men has steadily increased. We study how changes in energy intake and energy expenditure account for the over-time gender BMI puzzle using the Japanese National Nutrition Survey from 1975 to 2010, which provides nurse-measured height and weight and nutritionist-assisted food records. Because long-term data on energy expenditure do not exist, we calculate energy expenditure using a steady-state body weight model. We then conduct cross-country regression analysis to corroborate what we learn from the Japanese data. We find that both energy intake and energy expenditure have significantly decreased for Japanese adult men and women and that a larger reduction in energy expenditure among men than women accounts for the increasing male-to-female BMI gap. Trends in BMI and energy expenditure vary greatly by occupation, suggesting that a relatively large decrease in physical activity in the workplace among men underlies the gender BMI puzzle. The cross-country analysis supports the generalizability of the findings beyond the Japanese data. Furthermore, the analysis suggests the increasing male-to-female BMI gap is driven not only by a reduction in the energy requirements of physically demanding work but also by weakening occupational gender segregation. No support is found for other explanations, such as increasing female labor force participation, greater female susceptibility to malnutrition in utero, and gender inequality in nutrition in early life.
Mukherjee, A & Vasconcelos, LS 2018, 'On the Trade-off between Efficiency in Job Assignment and Turnover: The Role of Breakup Fees', The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 230-271.
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Murray, C, Clark, R, Mendolia, S & Siminski, P 2018, 'Direct Measures of Intergenerational Income Mobility for Australia', Economic Record, vol. 94, no. 307, pp. 445-468.
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We present the first Australian estimates of intergenerational mobility that draw on direct observations of income from two generations. Using panel data for three birth cohorts of young adults from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Australia survey, the estimated intergenerational income elasticity is 0.28. Correcting for attenuation bias raises this to 0.41. We estimate the rank correlation to be 0.27.We show that Australia has greater mobility than the US and this is not sensitive to methodological choices. We also show that spousal selection and family structure may be important determinants of income persistence across generations.
Tomoeda, K 2018, 'Finding a stable matching under type-specific minimum quotas', Journal of Economic Theory, vol. 176, pp. 81-117.
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Girsberger, EM, Rinawi, M & Krapf, M 2018, 'Wages and employment: The role of occupational skills', IZA Discussion Paper No. 11586 (June 2018).
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How skills acquired in vocational education and training (VET) affect wages and employment is not clear. We develop and estimate a search and matching model for workers with a VET degree. Workers differ in interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills, while firms require and value different combinations of these skills. Assuming that match productivity exhibits worker-job complementarity, we estimate how interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills map into job offers, unemployment and wages. We find that firms value cognitive skills on average almost twice as much as interpersonal and manual skills, and they prize complementarity in cognitive and interpersonal skills. The average return to VET skills in hourly wages is 9%, similar to the returns to schooling. Furthermore, VET appears to improve labour market opportunities through higher job arrival rate and lower job destruction. Workers thus have large benefits from acquiring a VET degree.
Li, M & Hindrayanto, I 2018, 'Looking for the stars: Estimating the natural rate of interest', UTS Business School Economics Working Paper Series 2018 - Paper No. 51.
Li, M & Mendieta-Munoz, I 2018, 'Are long-run output growth rates falling? Evidence from time-varying parameter models', University of Utah, Department of Economics Working Paper Series: 2018 -02.
Menzies, G, Stavrunova, O & Yerokhin, O 2018, 'The Effects of Birth Order on Adult Outcomes: Evidence from Australia'.
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This paper investigates how birth order affects education, labour market outcomes, health, personality traits, in-vivo transfers and inheritance of Australians. We find that later born children have lower educational attainment, though we cannot find a detrimental effect on health, personality or parental financial transfers. Sibship size is related to inheritance in a way consistent with the financial dilution hypothesis, but its causal effect cannot be identified with confidence.
