Economics - Research Publications

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    Investment in Australian Aboriginal Art
    Lye, JN ; Hirschberg, JG (Elsevier BV, 2020)
    Recent changes in Australian legislation that limit the value of how artworks that can be considered as assets in retirement funds have had an impact on the Australian Aboriginal Art market. In this paper we estimate the impact of these changes on the price index based on prices paid for 15,845 works by over 200 artists at art auctions from 1986 to 2019. Using an OLS and a quantile regression approach, we estimate hedonic price models for various segments of the Australian Aboriginal art market. These models are used to estimate price indices in order to investigate if the changes in Australian laws concerning the sale and use of art assets has influenced the potential returns for different segments of the market.
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    Impacts of graduated driver licensing regulations
    Hirschberg, J ; Lye, J (Elsevier, 2020-05-01)
    We evaluate the impact of the Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) system introduced in Victoria, Australia as they influence both injury and fatality rates. Since 1990, the Victorian GDL scheme has undergone several modifications including the introduction of new requirements and the stricter enforcement of existing regulations. Our evaluation of the GDL is based on monthly mortality and morbidity data for drivers 18–25 for the period January 2000 to June 2017. We estimate the immediate and long-term impacts of each policy change to the GDL system. Our results indicate that several initiatives in the GDL system have had impacts on both fatalities and injuries requiring hospitalisation when differentiated by gender. In a number of cases we observe that reactions to these measures are common to both genders. These include: the signalling of the proposed GDL changes in the media, the introduction of an extra probationary year for those under 21, the total alcohol ban for the entire probationary period, and limits on peer passengers for the first year. Stricter mobile phone restrictions appear to have had no impact on injuries for either males or females although they were associated with lower fatality rates for both. In addition, we found an indication that in the period prior to the introduction of the mandatory requirement of 120 h supervised driving, there was a rise in male driver injuries possibly caused by a rush of more inexperienced learners to obtain their probationary licence.
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    Estimating risk premiums for regulated firms when accounting for reference-day variation and high-order moments of return volatility
    Hirschberg, J ; Lye, J (Springer, 2021-04-01)
    In many jurisdictions, the determination of the acceptable rate of return for the assets of a regulated utility is based partially on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to determine risk premia. However, the traditional estimation of CAPM can be criticized for not including considerations of reference-day risk as well as the higher moments of the rates of return. In this paper, we attempt to account for both the potential variation induced by the definition of specific reference days and the higher moments of rates of return in the estimates of Beta. This paper provides a new methodology to account for reference-day variation. We construct a set of pseudo-monthly rates of return to identify the influence of reference-day choice. These pseudo-monthly asset returns are used to estimate measures of asset systematic risk for an international panel of regulated firms. To evaluate the influence of return rate volatility we examine the errors from the estimation of the CAPM with least squares, least absolute deviation and a partially adaptive maximum likelihood specification.
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    GRADING JOURNALS IN ECONOMICS: THE ABCS OF THE ABDC
    Hirschberg, JG ; Lye, JN (Wiley, 2020-09-01)
    Many institutions and governments grade academic journals for the evaluation of research. In this paper, we implement a multi-bibliometric methodology for the evaluation of such a list of journal grades. We examine the grades assigned by the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) for over 750 journals in the fields of economics and statistics. Firstly, we generate up to 48 bibliometric-based grades for each journal based on the grade distribution implied by the ABDC. Secondly, we categorize the bibliometrics employing a cluster analysis of an interrater agreement statistic. Thirdly, we present a visualization of the consistency of the grading by journal. Finally, we list those journals where the majority of the matched bibliometrics indicate a higher or lower grade than their ABDC grade.
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    Visualising Time: A Compendium of Time Series Plots
    Hirschberg, J ; Lye, J (Wiley, 2020-06-01)
    Graphs are important for highlighting relationships within a data series or across several series. Modern computer software has provided flexibility in the construction of graphic displays that would have been impossible with the tools that were available to researchers only a few decades ago. This article illustrates a variety of different graphical presentations for time ordered or time series data that can now be constructed. These include time series plots, bar charts, range plots, radar charts, scatter plots, heat maps and seasonality plots. For each graph type presented, we discuss the best practice for their construction .