The Effect of Changes in Monetary Policy on Consumer and Business Confidence

This article examines the response of consumer and business confidence to five measures of change in Australian monetary policy. Actual, expected and surprise increases in the official cash rate target and related interest rates are shown to negatively impact consumer sentiment. Business confidence is less affected by increases in the cash rate target, but is negatively affected by an increase in the 90-day bank accepted bill rate. Tests for model stability and asymmetries in the response of sentiment to increases and decreases in interest rates otherwise find only limited evidence for monetary policy having a perverse signalling effect on sentiment.     

Unrelated question model with two decks of cards

In this paper, we propose a new unrelated question model for estimating the prevalence of a sensitive characteristic within a population by utilizing two decks of cards. The resultant estimator is then compared to its competitors as to efficiency and as to protection of respondents. A real data application analyzing e-cigarette use among college students is considered.     

Is real per capita state personal income stationary? New nonlinear,asymmetric panel-data evidence

This paper re-examines the stochastic properties of U.S. state real per capita personal income, using new panel unit-root procedures. The new developments incorporate non-linearity, asymmetry, and cross-sectional correlation within panel-data estimation. Including nonlinearity and asymmetry finds that 43 states exhibit stationary real per capita personal income whereas including only nonlinearity produces 42 states that exhibit stationarity. Stated differently, we find that two states exhibit nonstationary real per capita personal income when considering nonlinearity, asymmetry, and cross-sectional dependence.     

A Different Perspective on the Evolution of UK Income Inequality

This paper scrutinizes the conventional wisdom about trends in UK income inequality and also places contemporary inequality in a much longer historical perspective. We combine household survey and income tax data to provide better coverage of all income ranges from the bottom to the very top (and make our estimates available to other researchers). We make a case for studying distributions of income between tax units (i.e. not assuming the full income sharing that goes with the use of the household as the unit of analysis) for reasons of principle as well as data harmonization. We present evidence that income inequality in the UK is as least as high today as it was just before the start of World War 2.     

Digital gaming culture in Vietnam: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT

New information and communication technologies continue to spread rapidly into the Asian marketplace, which has led to new patterns of leisure consumption, one of the most popular being digital gaming. However, in Vietnam there is limited research on gaming as a leisure activity. The purpose of this study is to explore the phenomenon of digital gaming in Vietnam to better understand how it is practiced in this culture. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-five gaming industry figures and gamers. Thematic analysis was used to guide data collection and analysis. The findings indicate that glocalisation, socialised gaming practices and competitiveness characterise the Vietnamese gaming experience. The distinct culture of Vietnam combined with globalised gaming consumption habits has created new modes of play culture, and hence leisure experiences that are growing in pervasive and influential ways.     

Neo‐Fisherism and inflation control

According to conventional central banking wisdom, an inflation‐targeting central bank should increase (decrease) its nominal interest rate target when inflation is above (below) its target. According to neo‐Fisherites, conventional central bankers have the sign wrong. Essentially all mainstream macroeconomic models tell us that increases in nominal interest rates increase inflation—in the short run and in the long run. This paper reviews neo‐Fisherian theory and evidence and addresses issues relating to inflation control in low real interest rate environments.     

Forecasting Bordeaux wine prices using state-space methods

Generic Bordeaux red wine (basic claret) can be regarded as being similar to an agricultural commodity. Production volumes are substantial, they are traded at high frequency and the quality of the product is relatively homogeneous. Unlike other commodities and the top-end wines (which represent only 3% of the traded volume), there is no futures market for generic Bordeaux wine. Reliable forecasts of prices can to large extent replace this information deficiency and improve the functioning of the market. We use state-space methods with monthly data to obtain a univariate forecasting model for the average price. The estimates highlight the stochastic trend and the seasonality present in the evolution of the price over the period 1999 to 2016. The model predicts the path of wine prices out of sample reasonably well, suggesting that this approach is useful for making reasonably accurate forecasts of future price movements.     

Hedonic Amenity Valuation and Housing Renovations

Hedonic and repeat sales estimators are commonly used to value such important urban amenities as schools, environmental quality and access to transit. Given that property data often omits information on quality differences between same‐aged homes as well as changes in structural attributes over time, researchers must assume that property renovations are uncorrelated with neighborhood amenities. We formally test if this assumption is valid by incorporating detailed data on renovations in Charlotte, North Carolina. We begin by testing how the inclusion of minor and major home improvements influences hedonic and repeat sales indices. Results find limited bias in hedonic indices and that renovated properties are no more likely to be sold than nonrenovated properties. Using the introduction of Charlotte's light rail‐transit system in 2000, we estimate a positive bias of between 1.6% and 19.9% on the capitalized benefits of access to light rail due to omitted information on renovations. Our results show that a number of common data cleaning techniques used to address missing information on structural improvements may worsen this bias.