Timo Henckel is a Fellow in international and development economics at the Crawford School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University Vanuatu’s economy paints a picture of contradictions: it has continued on the recent growth path with low inflation, government budget surpluses, and increased capital inflows. Yet successful management of the economy has not translated into ...

Many countries are coping with the realization that population ageing demands long-term policies to accommodate rising elderly costs. While attention is rightly focused on rising pension and health care costs, interest is also being directed to potential means whereby some of these expenditures could be curtailed. In countries where population ageing is just getting underway as fertility declin...

One of the explanations for global imbalances is the self-financing behavior of credit-constrained firms in rapidly growing emerging markets. We use an extensive firm-level data set from several Asian countries during 2002–2011, and test the micro foundation of this theory by estimating the effect of an exogenous change in credit constraints, resulting from financial reforms, on firms’ saving b...

We present a search-based model of the interbank money market and monetary policy implementation. Banks are subject to reserve requirements and the central bank tenders reserves. Interbank payments redistribute holdings and banks trade with each other in a decentralized (over-the-counter) market. The central bank provides standing facilities where banks can either deposit surpluses or borrow to...

The case study conducted in this paper looks at residential water pricing from three different points of view. It first describes existing urban water-pricing practices in Southern France, emphasizing that pricing is not yet being used as a tool for providing economic incentives to save water. It then looks at the observed impact of pricing on water consumption, through an econometric analysis ...

Forage crops are the staple ingredients of dietary rations fed to ruminant animals. They provide the animal with a large source of dietary fiber, critical for normal functioning of the rumen and its associated microenvironment (Driehuis and Oude Elferink, 2000). The preservation of forage crops into a fermented feedstuff known as silage has been an important practice in agriculture, especially ...

Market transparency refers to the level of current trade information revealed to participants by market makers. This paper analyzes the effect of market transparency on the outcomes of posted-offer style Business-to-Business e-commerce markets. First, increasing market transparency improves the pricetracking ability of sellers, and results in higher efficiency. However, revelation of quantity i...

We study the relation between the number of firms and price-cost margins under price competition with uncertainty about competitors’ costs. We present results of an experiment in which two, three and four identical firms repeatedly interact in this environment. In line with the theoretical prediction, market prices decrease with the number of firms, but on average stay above marginal costs. Pri...

The accumulating scientific evidence -- across many disciplines -- regarding human evolution and the dualities and complexities of human nature indicates that the core ideological assumptions of both capitalism and socialism are simplistic and ultimately irreconcilable. A biologically grounded approach to social justice enables us to articulate a new ideological paradigm that I call ''Fair Shar...

We develop a method for identifying and quantifying the fiscal channels that help finance government spending shocks and apply it to postwar U.S. data. We define fiscal shocks as surprises in defense spending and show that they are more precisely identified when defense stock data are used in addition to aggregate macroeconomic data. Our results show that in the postwar period, over 9% of the U...