Discussion Paper
Browse by
Recent Deposits
-
A firm grip on nature: The economic case for environmental personhood.
Nature is declining at unprecedented rates. We posit that the external effects of ecosystem degradation can be understood as a lack of property rights of stakeholders advocating on behalf of future generations and the ... -
Polarisation and Poverty Reduction in Africa: The Devil is in the Choice of Equivalence Relation
The focus of this paper is the low observed mean consumption elasticity of poverty in Africa, and the suggestion that polarisation of national distributions, specifically the non-parametric ‘relative distribution’ method, ... -
Cost-(in)effective public good provision: An experimental exploration
This paper investigates the determinants of cost-(in)effective giving to public goods. We conduct a pre-registered experiment to elucidate how factors at the institutional and individual levels shape individual contributions ... -
State history and political instability: The disadvantage of early state development
This paper establishes that long-term exposure to statehood is detrimental to building politically stable regimes outside Europe. It argues that accumulated statehood experience impeded the diffusion of European institutions ... -
In Search of Competitive Givers
Much of the theoretical and experimental research on charitable giving allows for three main types of donor: pure altruists, impure altruists, and pure warm-glow givers. For none of these types should donations be increasing ... -
Education spending and Wagner’s law: New international evidence
This paper examines the association between economic development and two measures of public spending on education, namely the ‘national effort’ (total spending as a percentage of GDP) and ‘budget share’ (total spending as ... -
Climate, Diseases, and the Origins of Corruption
It has been commonly observed that tropical countries typically suffer from intense corruption and underdevelopment. I offer an explanation for this long-standing disparity across the world based on variation in the intensity ... -
Does Pollution Affect Crime? Evidence from U.S. Cities
In this paper we study the relationship between air pollution and crime. We construct a city-level, hourly data set with 2.4 million crimes and link each crime to data on pollution and controls, e.g. weather variables. ... -
Does institutional quality foster economic complexity?
This paper examines the extent to which the quality of institutions, measured by the Economic Freedom of the World index, helps shape cross-country differences in economic complexity. To this end, I employ the intensity ... -
How Close to Home Does Charity Begin?
This paper uses a field experiment to analyse the extent to which people are more inclined to support a charity focused on people or causes in their own region, compared to regions in other parts of the country. New Zealand ... -
Migration Fears, Policy Uncertainty and Economic Activity
Motivated by the recent European migrant crisis, Brexit, and President Trump's immigration priorities, we provide new evidence into how migration fears and migration policy uncertainty affect macroeconomic outcomes across ... -
What Has New Zealand Gained From The FTA With China?: Two Counterfactual Analyses
New Zealand (NZ) was the rst developed country to have signed a free trade agreement (FTA) with China. We investigate the e ects of the 2008 NZ-China FTA on (i) exports from NZ to China, and (ii) real GDP per capita in ... -
In Search of Effective Altruists
The effective altruism movement argues that people wanting to do the most good they can should donate to charities fighting poverty in poor countries overseas, rather than to charities helping people in need in wealthy ... -
A new tool for creating personal and social EQ-5D-5L value sets, including valuing ‘dead’
A new online tool for creating personal and social EQ-5D-5L value sets was recently developed and trialled in New Zealand (NZ). Health state values for each participant are determined using the PAPRIKA method – in the ... -
Taxing capital income in New Zealand: an international perspective
In the 1980s and 1990s New Zealand undertook a large number of tax reforms designed to improve the performance of the economy. Top marginal income-tax rates were reduced, a value-added tax (GST) was introduced, a system ... -
The knowledge-capital model: The case of intra-Asian foreign direct investment
Employing a panel dataset of bilateral inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI) for 31 Asian countries and territories over the period 2001-2012, we estimate the knowledge-capital (KK) model to find the dominant ... -
Vietnam: The Next Asian Tiger?
We investigate the growth experience of Vietnam, the country which has been getting recent attention as being the next emerging giant. First, we present an aggregate level investigation of Vietnam's economic growth ... -
Number of bidders and the winner’s curse
Within an affiliated value auction setting, we study the relationship between the number of bidders and the winner’s curse in terms of its occurrence and its expected harm. From a design perspective, we find that both ...