Blog Title: CoreEcon

Creeping acquisitions

John Durie finishes his column in the weekend Australian as follows: Next Friday is the closing date for submissions on creeping acquisitions and the big business lobby is adamant no new law is required. The odds of Emerson agreeing with big business are high. Let’s hope that Mr Durie is reading the political tea leaves correctly. In my read more..

Telstra usage meter redux

Last week, I wrote about concerns that Telstra’s Bigpond usage meter was not measuring usage accurately. Similar issues were echoed by David Firth in The Australian who quoted from my experience (I posted my account on Whirlpool with the username ‘EconProf’ — that wasn’t to be anonymous but I must have chosen that at some read more..

Carbon reduction and India

One of the concerns I have long had about international carbon pollution reduction schemes is that they are designed by nice people in the developed world who have never been near a developing country. An article from the Indian “Economic Times” summarises my concerns. The article is here. The problem is simple and summarised by this read more..

Driving charges

In the Sydney Morning Herald today, a call for charges in driving. In a paper released this morning which the Treasury stresses does not represent its official view, economist Paul Hubbard commends Sydney’s experiment with time-of-day pricing levels for the Harbour Bridge and Tunnel and says it could go further. Noting that Sydney’s E-Toll system is only read more..

Higher weekend petrol prices

John Hewson writes in an Op-Ed in the AFR today that he has observed over a long period of time that a particular petrol station raises it prices by between 15 and 25 cents on Thursday mornings.  He deduces that this is a simple case of “gouging customers”.  I have heard this argument quite a read more..

Revenue caps

Back in the 1990s, I can remember being asked by a state government agency to comment on their proposal for ‘revenue regulation’ of a state utility. For the reasons stated below I told them it was stupid. A few years later my colleague at RSSS at the time, Rohan Pitchford, was asked a similar question by read more..

Hockey too

For so many months I have been waiting for the Opposition to start stating the alternative side of the stimulus debate without resorting to simplistic arguments or convoluted ones with clear inconsistencies. Well, I was very pleased to read this account of a recent CEDA speech by Joe Hockey. Not only did he articulate a read more..

Newspaper management, not newspapers, is the problem

News Ltd CEO, John Hartigan, gave a speech yesterday that has to be read to be believed. Amazingly, it is posted on The Australian website (without I should add, ads!). He argues that it is his news coverage which draws in the readers: Read more expand(document.getElementById('ddet1033873953'));expand(document.getElementById('ddetlink1033873953')) In Australia we had the Victorian bushfires. It wasn’t exclusive to News read more..

Iran Election Statistics

How do you detect election fraud? A recent article in the Washington Post describes a novel statistical idea. It is the kind of twist on viewing the data that any freakonomics fan should have thought of. Read More expand(document.getElementById('ddet717106088'));expand(document.getElementById('ddetlink717106088')) Most people believe the election results in Iran were rigged. They base this on a couple of arguments. The read more..

Exiting a bad equilibrium

There are two big inefficiencies in the Australian mortgage market.  1.  The cost of mortgage finance is higher than it would be if there was more competition for the four major banks. 2.  Households bear the risk of interest rates changes when other parties could bear that risk at lower cost.  Australia’s mortgage markets are not seriously threatening read more..

Charities and micropayments

One of the great joys of having an iPod I have found is podcasts. I listen to several but one has been a regular, This American Life put out by Chicago Public Radio. At regular intervals, the host starts the podcast with an appeal for donations because of the bandwidth cost of distributing the podcast. read more..

Confucius say

Having been accused of being a Chinese spy, since I am Director of Business Research for our University’s Confucius Institute, let me reassure you. Firstly, I was once offered a job with the ONA in Canberra – but after more than a year my security clearance had not come through and I left and did a read more..

The Age of Innovation

For not-so-surprising reasons, I’ve been thinking lately about lifecycles. My AFR op-ed today (partially written with a newborn babe in the crook of my arm) is on age and creativity. Full text over the fold. Age No Bar to Brilliance, Australian Financial Review, 30 June 2009 Einstein’s major contributions to physics were published when he was read more..

Management versus Economics

I recently became aware* of a paper by Benito Arruñada and Xosé H. Vázquez that attempts to link the outcome of MBA degrees to the different subjects offered – specifically the proportions of  subjects that are based on standard assumptions of rationality and self-interest (called economics subjects in the paper) and those that rely on read more..

Demographics vs the GFC

A very interesting piece in the Times online refers to the impacts of demographic change on fiscal outcomes being ten times the impact of the GFC (original source is the IMF). There are two demographic timebombs going on globally. One is the rise in population from 6.6 billion to around 9 billion at mid-century as forecast read more..

Fallacy watch

One fallacy that often emerges goes like this: agents aren’t rational all of the time, therefore, any analysis based on them being rational is wrong. It is a fallacy because a lack of rationality is actually highly circumstances-dependent and so finding an instance of it does not translate generally. For instance, Sunstein and Thaler’s ‘Nudge’ read more..

Markets for Unlocked iPhones

It didn’t seem much remarked but last week Apple started selling iPhone 3GS’s completely unlocked in Australia for $1040 (US$840) for the 32GB model. And the Apple warranty still applies. This has happened before but not in Australia. Our of curiousity, I took a look at what appeared to be the eBay price of these read more..

Grocery Choiceless

The Government finally killed the Grocery Choice website late last week. As regular readers know, I found it useless in intended function, distortionary and not at all supported by the ACCC’s grocery inquiry. This was unlike FuelWatch that had the potential to do good and was based on evidence from WA that it would at read more..

iPhone 3GS: Upgrade?

So I have my hands on a new iPhone 3GS. Some first impressions. First, it is really really fast. Web pages, applications and start-up all increased by a factor of 2. Second, the new camera is excellent and easy to use (with zoom to scan in business cards). Third, voice control works very well. Speak read more..

Mind the gap

Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting country’s GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story – and other stories- much more clearly. And it is really read more..

The kind of folk we need for Gov2.0

In my post the other day on Government 2.0, I highlighted the baby names explorer as being symbol of the problem the government needed to solve rather than an aspiration. One of the developers of that explorer, Seb Chan at the Powerhouse Museum, has written a post about Government 2.0. It is a great read read more..

Educational Catchup Downunder

A wonderfully ambitious paper just published in the new Journal of Human Capital combines school enrollment data and demographic tables to estimate educational attainment rates for 74 countries over the period 1870-2010. Here’s the abstract. The Century of Education (published version, working paper version) Christian Morrisson & Fabrice Murtin read more..

ToiletGate

With Government 2.0 up and running, I decided to see how the iPhone toilet finder application developers were going. One site that produces Toilet Mate (a paid $1.19 app) has gone quiet. But another, ShowtheLoo, is still active with a free app. But here is the interesting bit expand(document.getElementById('ddet565174426'));expand(document.getElementById('ddetlink565174426')) On their ShowtheLoo site is the following blog post read more..

Telstra’s dodgy usage measures

In The Age today an article about Telstra Bigpond users having ridiculous bills for exceeding download limits when they believe they are doing far from that or even if they computers and modems off. Read more expand(document.getElementById('ddet621899966'));expand(document.getElementById('ddetlink621899966')) Nigel Hopkinson said he was disputing a charge of $8562.31 for 73GB of excess data use. The apparent usage was recorded read more..

Tax Online

Ken Henry’s tax review held a conference in Melbourne last week. If (like me), you weren’t able to get there, you’ll be glad to see that PDFs of all the papers and powerpoints are now online. Auerbach and Slemrod’s contributions are particularly recommended.

Government 2.0

I have long been on about the open availability of public data (see here and here, for example). Now, Nicholas Gruen is leading a taskforce on Government 2.0. The goal of the taskforce is to reform government to do just that. Sounds great. True to Nicholas’s ‘out of the box’ type of management, there is read more..

Pricing out of the market

A few years back, The Economist offered a three option subscriber plan (i) an web only subscription for $59; (ii) a print only subscription for $125 and (iii) a web and print subscription for $125. Dan Ariely points out that this makes consumers more likely to pay $125 for both as it seems like a read more..

Making switching easy is not the same as switching

In the Sydney Morning Herald today, an article looking at the issue of bank switching costs. It argues that the government moves last year to make it easier for people to switch banks has been unsuccessful as evidenced by a lack of take-up. Read more expand(document.getElementById('ddet1516406777'));expand(document.getElementById('ddetlink1516406777')) Despite widespread outrage about mortgage rate increases and the introduction of direct read more..

Unified but Unequal

Christian Dustmann, Johannes Ludsteck, and Uta Schoenberg have a new paper out in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, dismissing the notion that Germany has stayed pretty equal over recent decades. Here’s their abstract and the key picture: Revisiting the German Wage Structure (gated published version, ungated working paper) This paper read more..

Professor Costello on inflation

From my piece in the AFR this week… Peter Costello claims that our next big economic challenge will be inflation. I hope he’s right! If the global and Australian economies recover more quickly than expected, then it is quite possible that inflation will rise. If this does happen then I am confident that central banks will read more..