Department of Economics - Working Papers Series

From The University of Melbourne
Department of Economics, The University of Melbourne, 4th Floor, FBE Building, Level 4, 111 Barry Street. Victoria, 3010, Australia.
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2043: Creating Confusion "Abstract: We develop a model in which a politician seeks to prevent people from making informed decisions. The politician can manipulate information at a cost, but cannot commit to an information structure. The receivers are rational and internalize the politician's incentives. In the unique equilibrium of the game, the receivers' beliefs are unbiased but endogenously noisy. We use this model to interpret the rise of social media. We argue that social media simultaneously (i) improves the underlying, intrinsic precision of the receivers' information but also (ii) reduces the politician's costs of manipulation. We show that there is a critical threshold such that if the costs of manipulation fall enough, the politician is better off and the receivers are worse off, despite the underlying improvement in their information. But if the costs of manipulation do not fall too much, and if the receivers are also sufficiently well coordinated, the manipulation backfires. In this scenario, the politician would want to invest in commitment devices that prevent them from manipulating information."

Chris Edmond and Yang K Lu

2042: Inequality and Poverty in Africa: Comparing Panels of Income Distributions from Different Data Sources

Duangkamon Chotikapanich, William E. Griffiths, Gholamreza Hajargasht, D.S. Prasada Rao and Charley Xia

2041: Grading Journals in Economics: The ABCs of the ABDC

Joseph Hirschberg and Jeanette Lye

2040: By chance or by choice? Biased attribution of others’ outcomes

Nisvan Erkal, Lata Gangadharan and Boon Han Koh

2039: Effective Tax Rates on Different Corporate Investments

John Freebairn

2038: Labor’s Share, the firm’s market power and TFP

Robert Dixon and Guay Lim

2037: Confidence Intervals for Ratios: Econometric Examples with Stata "Abstract: Ratios of parameter estimates are often used in econometric applications. However, the test of these ratios when estimated can cause difficulties since the ratio of asymptotically normally distributed random variables have a Cauchy distribution for which there are no finite moments. This paper presents a method for the estimation of confidence intervals based on the Fieller approach that has been shown to be preferable to the usual Delta method. Using example applications, we demonstrate that a few extra steps in the examination of the estimate of the ratio may provide a confidence interval with superior coverage."

Jeanette Lye and Joseph Hirschberg

2036: Using the GB2 Income Distribution: A Review

Duangkamon Chotikapanich, William Griffiths, Gholamreza Hajargasht, Wasana Karunarathne and D.S. Prasada Rao

2033: Competition in the Manuka Honey Industry in New Zealand

Peter Lloyd

2032: Telecommunications infrastructure and usage and the FDI–growth nexus: evidence from Asian-21 countries "Abstract: This paper examines causal relationships between telecommunications infrastructure and usage (TEL), foreign direct investment (FDI), and economic growth in the Asian-21 countries for the period 1965–2012. TEL is defined in terms of the prevalence of telephone main lines, mobile phones, internet servers and users, as well as the extent of fixed broadband. These measures are considered both individually and collectively in the form of a composite index of TEL. We report results on long-run relationships between TEL, FDI, and economic growth. We also use a panel vector auto-regression model to reveal the nature of Granger causality among the three variables. Results from these causal relationships provide important policy implications to the Asian-21 countries."

Mak Arvin, Mahendhiran Nair, Jay Mittal, and Neville R. Norman

2031: Bayesian Inference for Health Inequality and Welfare Using Qualitative Data "Abstract: We show how to use Bayesian inference to compare two ordinal categorical distributions commonly occurring with data on self-reported health status. Procedures for computing probabilities for first and second order stochastic dominance and equality or S-dominance are described, along with methodology for obtaining posterior densities for health inequality indices. The techniques are applied to four years of data on Australian self-reported health status."

David Gunawan, William Griffths and Duangkamon Chotikapanich

2030: Bayesian Weighted Inference from Surveys "Abstract: Data from large surveys are often supplemented with sampling weights that are designed to reflect unequal probabilities of response and selection inherent in complex survey sampling methods. We propose two methods for Bayesian estimation of parametric models in a setting where the survey data and the weights are available, but where information on how the weights were constructed is unavailable. The first approach is to simply replace the likelihood with the pseudo likelihood in the formulation of Bayes theorem. This is proven to lead to a consistent estimator but also leads to credible intervals that suffer from systematic undercoverage. Our second approach involves using the weights to generate a representative sample which is embedded within a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or other simulation algorithm designed to estimate the parameters of the model. In extensive simulation studies, the latter methodology is shown to achieve performance comparable to the standard frequentist solution of pseudo maximum likelihood, with the added advantage of being applicable to models that require inference via MCMC. The methodology is demonstrated further by fitting a mixture of gamma densities to a sample of Australian household income."

David Gunawan, William Griffths and Anatasios Panagiotelis and Duangkamon Chotikapanich

2029: Bayesian Assessment of Lorenz and Stochastic Dominance

David Lander, David Gunawan, William Griffiths and Duangkamon Chotikapanich

2027: Australian Exceptionalism? Inequality and Living Standards 1821-1871

Laura Panza and Jeffrey G. Williamson

2026: Alternative Graphical Representations of the Confidence Intervals for the Structural Coefficient from Exactly Identified Two-Stage Least Squares

Joseph Hirschberg and Jeanette Lye

2025: How Do Exporters Cope With Violence? Evidence from Political Strikes in Bangladesh

Reshad N. Ahsan and Kazi Iqbal

2024: Estimation and Testing of Stochastic Frontier Models using Variational Bayes

Gholamreza Hajargasht and William Griffiths

2023: Bayesian Assessment of Lorenz and Stochastic Dominance Using a Mixture of Gamma Densities

David Lander, David Gunawan, William Griffiths and Duangkamon Chotikapanich

2022: Inference for Lorenz Curves

Gholamreza Hajargasht and William Griffiths

2021: Rare Events and Risk Perception: Evidence from Fukushima Accident

Tomasz Wozniak

2020: Rare Events and Risk Perception: Evidence from Fukushima Accident

Renaud Coulomb and Yanos Zylberberg

2019: A Review of the Recent Literature on the Institutional Economics Analysis of the Long-Run Performance of Nations

Peter Lloyd and Cassey Lee

2018: The First 100 Years of Tariffs in Australia: the Colonies

P. J. Lloyd

2015: Does Corruption Attenuate the Effect of Red Tape on Exports

Reshad Ahsan

2003: Market Size Matters:A Model of Excess Volatility in Large Markets

Kei Kawakami

2002: The Indirect Impact of Antiretroviral Therapy: Mortality Risk, Mental Health, and HIV-Negative Labor Supply

Victoria Baranov, Daniel Bennett and Hans-Peter Kohler

2001: The Impact of AIDS Treatment on Savings and Human Capital Investment in Malawi

Victoria Baranov and Hans-Peter Kohler

1198: Instrument-free Identifcation and Estimation of the Diferentiated Products Models

David Byrne, Susumu Imai and Vasilis Sarafidis

1197: Consumer Search in Retail Gasoline Markets

David Byrne and Nicolas de Roos

1196: Estimating Fiscal Multipliers:News From a Nonlinear World

Giovanni Caggiano, Efrem Castelnuovo, Valentina Colombo and Gabriela Nodari

1195: Uncertainty Shocks and Unemployment Dynamics in U.S. Recessions

Giovanni Caggiano, Efrem Castelnuovo and Nicolas Groshenny

1194: Granger-causal analysis of GARCH models: a Bayesian approach

Tomasz Woźniak

1193: Egyptian and Syrian commodity markets after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire: a Bayesian structural VECM analysis

Laura Panza and Tomasz Wozniak

1192: Job polarisation and earnings inequality in Australia

Michael Coelli and Jeff Borland

1191: Granger Causality and Regime Inference in Bayesian Markov-Switching VARs

Matthieu Droumagueta, Anders Warneb and Tomasz Wozniakc

1190: Welfare Consequences of Information Aggregation and Optimal Market Size

William E. Griffiths and Gholamreza Hajargasht

1189: Welfare Consequences of Information Aggregation and Optimal Market Size

Kei Kawakami

1188: Excessive Dynamic Trading: Propagation of Belief Shocks in Small Markets

Kei Kawakami

1187: The influence of student experiences on post-graduation surveys

Joseph Hirschberg and Jeanette Lye

1184: Effectiveness of the Australian Fiscal Stimulus Package: A DSGE Analysis

Shuyun May Li and Adam Spencer

1183: Competition, Markups, and the Gains from

Chris Edmond, Virgiliu Midrigan and Daniel Yi Xu

1182: Information Aggregation and Optimal Market Size

Kei Kawakami

1181: Search and Stockpiling in Retail Gasoline Markets

David Byrne and Nicolas de Roos

1180: Tell Me Something I Don’t Already Know:Informedness and External Validity in Information Programs

David Byrne, Andrea La Nauze and Leslie Martin

1179: Lay people’s models of the economy: A study based on surveys of consumer sentiments

Robert Dixon, William Griffiths and Guay Lim

1178: Maximally Informative Decision Rules In a Two-Person Decision Problem

Kei Kawakami

1177: CRITICAL EVENTS

Victor E. Jennings, Bill Lloyd-Smith and Duncan Ironmonger

1176: How do Co nsumers Respond to Gasoline

David Byrne and Gordon Leslie

1175: Aggregative Oligopoly Games with Entry

Simon P. Anderson, Nisvan Erkal and

1174: Optimal Sharing Strategies in Dynamic

Nisvan Erkal and Deborah Minehart