ERSA seminar series
We run a seminar series twice a month so as to provide a less formal opportunity for fellow students to present their research and receive feedback and assistance from fellow students and selected academic staff. Please contact Adeline Tubb if you would like to schedule a presentation.
Seminars in 2009
Tim Robinson (October 16 2009)
This paper attempts to reconcile the high estimates of economy-wide price stickiness implied by estimates of the New-Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) obtained using aggregate data with the lower values implied by surveys of firms' pricing behaviour. Microeconomic evidence also suggests that the frequency with which firms adjust their prices varies across sectors. We show that in the presence of this heterogeneity, estimates of aggregate price stickiness from microeconomic and macroeconomic data should be expected to differ. We introduce heterogeneity in firms' pricing decisions, as well as a more realistic production structure, into an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model, and calibrate it using the microeconomic pricing data. We show that estimates of the NKPC based on aggregate data generated from our model considerably overstate the true degree of price stickiness, reflecting a form of misspecification and a lack of exogenous instruments.
Xuan Nguyen (September 25 2009)
How does technology spillover, often represented by Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime in the South, affect the decision of a Multinational between producing at home country and undertaking Export Platform FDI (EPF) in the South? What are the implications of Southern trade/IPR policy on welfare in the presence of EPF? This paper answers these questions by examining an international duopoly model with two firms, a Northern firm (firm N) and a Southern firm (firm S). When firm N undertakes EPF in the South to take advantage of lower production costs, its advanced technology spills over to firm S, which improves competitiveness of the later in Southern market and enables the later to compete with firm N in the third market. We show that, EPF always improves Southern welfare and there exists an unique value of spillover rate that maximizes Southern welfare. These findings explain what observed in reality that governments in developing countries often induces FDI into exporting sector in which the local firms do not have access to advanced technology.
Robert Wallner (September 4 2009)
The term 'price bubble' is touted frequently in the media to illustrate the regularly fluctuating price levels that characterise the Sydney residential property market. An obvious question is whether these price movements are being driven by agent speculation and exuberance or by changes in the underlying fundamentals of the housing market. In this paper we look for statistical substantiation of a price bubble in the Sydney property market during the period 1985 to 2006, and how those results are distributed across the city. In order to achieve this we build a two-state Markov chain regime switching model that can test for various forms of speculative market behaviours, including those most associated with a traditional ‘price bubble’. We look at the results for median price levels in Sydney as a whole as well as at the postcode level. Our results indicate that while there is significant evidence for a house price bubble in the Sydney property market over this period, those results are not distributed homogenously across the city.
Renuka Sane (August 28 2009)
We estimate the determinants of transition to part-time work and retirement of men above the age of 50 years in Australia. We are particularly interested in evaluating the impact of recent changes to superannuation policy to encourage elderly labour-force participation. We restrict our analysis to men who are in full-time work at the beginning of our data-set. We use a competing risk hazard model to estimate these transitions.
Rong Zhu (August 21 2009)
The impact of quantity-based education-occupation mismatch such as overeducation and undereducation on individual's labor market outcomes has received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we assess the impact of major-job mismatch on college graduates' early career earnings using a subsample from 2008 Chinese College Graduates' Employment and Work Skills Survey. The linear specifications commonly used in relevant literature are rejected by a recently developed specification test, and a fully nonparametric approach is employed. After obtaining estimate for every mismatched individual, we find substantial heterogeneity in the effects of major-job mismatch on individual's monthly income. The mean impact is negative but is very limited for the full sample and various subsamples.
Moriah Bellenger (7 August 2009)
This study estimates the marginal contribution to environmental performance made by six separate macroinvertebrate metrics included in an additive index developed to measure wadeable stream condition. We model the metrics as outputs in a quadratic directional output distance function, which serves as an alternate measure of environmental performance, and then derive the marginal performance for each metric. We use the resulting estimates of marginal performance to develop a metric weighting scheme that incorporates each metric’s marginal contribution to performance, at each site, and then construct a weighted version of the original index. The performance-weighted index provides a similar measure of overall performance in this application, while also adding new information on the relative importance of each of the index metrics. This represents a new application of existing methods to measure productivity, and is closely related to the environmental shadow price literature.
Jonathan Lim (29 May 2009)
Is free entry desirable for social efficiency? While this important
question has been studied extensively in the industrial organization
literature, the focus, almost exclusively, has been on a closed economy
setting. We revisit this question in an international oligopoly where both
domestic and foreign firms compete in the home market. In a closed economy
setting, Mankiw and Whinston (1986) and Suzumura and Kiyono (1987) showed
that in a homogeneous product Cournot oligopoly the number of firms in a
free-entry equilibrium is socially excessive. However, in an open economy
setup, we find that this result, often referred to as the “excess-entry"
theorem, does not hold. Except for the special case where no foreign firms
are present, there always exist parameterizations such that the free-entry
number of home firms is insufficient. In other words, the number of firms
that enter falls short of the number that maximizes domestic welfare.
Furthermore, for linear demand, we show that trade liberalization makes
insufficient entry more likely. During the 1960's and 1970's several
countries including Japan, South Korea and India had high trade barriers
and domestic entry regulation policies. It has often been argued that this
"excess entry theorem," can provide a justification for entry regulation
as a way of improving social welfare. Over the last three decades, these
countries along with many others have lowered their trade barriers. Our
theoretical analysis suggests that entry regulation of home firms at the
margin - a welfare improving policy in a closed economy - might actually
reduce welfare in an open economy setting.
Anna Zhu (22 May 2009)
The alarming rise in the number of overweight children in developed nations during a trend of increasing rates of female participation in the labour force has raised concerns about whether longer hours in employment (and away from the child) contributes to poorer health outcomes for children. This paper explores this relationship for Australia using the first wave of data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children (LSAC). A central question this paper asks is: whether or not maternal employment is endogenous; more specifically, whether full-time mothers are different to part-time mothers (and to stay-at-home mothers) in unobservable ways that also influence child-rearing practices and therefore, the child’s body mass index. This paper adopts a model which jointly estimates a multinomial treatment with a binary outcome, testing for this potential endogeneity, and therefore, producing a more confident interpretation of whether or not a mother’s working pattern influences the likelihood of a child becoming overweight.
Renuka Sane (1 May 2009)
We think of indexation as an important mechanism to anchor the pension
payment to one or more indicators of the economy, so that when one
indicator undergoes a shift owing to wider socio-economic changes, other
indicators automatically adjust to that change. Indexation, in our view,
also provides insurance against unanticipated changes in the economy.
Against this background, we present the current indexation practices of
countries and seek out some basic principles that we think should guide
the design of indexation policy. We then turn to issues relevant to the
practice of indexation focusing especially on consistencies between the
multiple pension schemes that operate in most countries and the
appropriate indexing benchmarks. Finally we turn to the cost of the
insurance dimension of indexation and point out that option pricing
techniques could be used to price the indexation guarantee.
Abu Shonchoy (24 April 2009)
Seasonal migration due to natural disasters or agricultural downturns is a common phenomenon in developing countries. Using primary data from a cross sectional household survey from the northern part of Bangladesh, we quantify the factors that influence the seasonal migration decision. Controlling for other characteristics, we find that individuals with access to micro-credit did not have a significantly different level of income to those who did not have access to credit. Households that took the decision to migrate combined with micro-credit earn significantly more than households with only micro-credit in the lean period. In addition, we find a significant role for network effects in influencing the migration decision, with the presences of kinsmen at the place of destination having a significant impact. The results have numerous potential policy implications, including for the design of micro-credit schemes.
Meliyanni Johar (17 April 2009)
The purpose of this study is to provide a broader description of the body mass
and wages relationship than the traditional conditional mean relationship, by
allowing heterogenous associations according to the wage levels. In addition,
it is hypothesised that the body mass-wage relationship is particularly strong
among workers whose jobs involved substantial social skills. The endogeneity of
body mass is addressed using instrumental variable technique. The empirical
results are based on the US's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979-2004.
Seminars in 2008
Entry Regulation in an Open Economy , by Jonathan Lim
Preference of Australian informal care-givers, by Yuan Yuan Gu
The short-run effects of the Croation war on education, employment and earnings by Milica Kecmanovic
Seasonal migration and effectiveness of NGOs in Bangladesh by Abu Shonchoy
Environmental economics: water policy by Thomas Longden
Modeling access to treatment for mental health by Joanne Epp
Game theoretic approach to quarantining policy by Daniel Bunting
Sanctions design in emissions trading programmes by Philia Restiani
The impact of job loss on family dissolution by Silvia Mendolia
2009 International Job Market Opportunities for Economists (IJOE) seminar
The seminar was held on 11th September 2009. An interesting IJOE overview can be found from here.
Bill's slides can be found from here.
Lisa's slides can be found from here.
Suraj's slides can be found from here.
Some additional useful resources:The Hiring of an Economist: A Case Study
Survey of the Labor Market for New PhD Hires in Economics 2009-2010
2008 Information workshop for job market candidates
An information workshop was held for job market candidates on 15th August 2008.
The presentations can be accessed here:Overview of the international job market by Lisa Magnani