Business

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 19

  • (2000) McNaughton, Tracey
    Thesis


  • (2000) Pease, Andrew
    Thesis

  • (2007) Beckett, Gordon W
    Thesis
    The commissariat was the main economic drivers in the colonial economy between 1788 and 1835. It is not frequently discussed in the literature and it was Professor N. G. Butlin who challenged economic historians to write the story of the commissariat in operation. This thesis relates the story of the role and operations of the commissariat in colonial NSW. The commissariat filled many roles, ranging from government store, to financial services provider and a quasi-treasury. It was the main purchaser of local production from local settlers, and offered a novel and creative 'barter system' by exchanging store receipts for goods and services received from local settlers

  • (2019) Jiranaphawiboon, Abhisit
    Thesis
    Public concerns about potential harms of violent video games are often based on a positive association between exposure to video game violence and aggression found in psychology experiments. Whether this aggressive tendency manifests itself in terms of actual criminal behavior seems unclear. In this paper, I utilize temporal variation in aggregated violence exposure using data containing weekly unit sales of the top 30 game titles in the United States from 2005-2014, and analyze the impact of this exposure on assaults committed by young males. I find that weeks with high intensely violent video game sales have a lower number of assaults. The effect becomes more noticeable during the 9 P.M. – 12 A.M. time window over the weekend. One million additional sales of intensely violent games reduces assaults by 2.15% during that time period. I interpret this finding as a product of time substitution, where people play games that they have recently bought for longer hours, which draws them away from risky outdoor activities. As a result, crime drops in response to the absence of proactive criminals on the streets. A highly pronounced impact among young males can be explained through self-selection: they disproportionately commit impulsive crimes, and also identify as frequent purchasers and avid players of intensely violent games. In further evidence of the time substitution hypothesis, crime rates are higher in the week preceding a new release, when gamers are likely to reduce their playing hours of old games in anticipation of beginning the new game. The presence of time substitution in this natural experiment reconciles with the opposite findings from the lab. Gamers cannot commit crimes spurred on by their heightened aggressive tendencies while simultaneously gaming.



  • (2008) Engel, James
    Thesis
    Writers on the business cycle often emphasize that non-linear models are needed to account for certain of its features. Thus it is often said that either the asymmetry of the duration of business cycle expansions and contractions or the variability of these quantities demand a non-linear model. Such comments are rarely made precise however and mostly consist of references to such assertions from the past. Thus the asymmetry in the cycle is mostly accompanied by references to Keynes (1936) and Burns and Mitchell (1946). But these authors were looking at what we call today the classical cycle i.e. movements in the level of GDP, and so the fact that there are long expansions and short contractions can arise simply due to the presence of long-run growth in the economy, and it is not obvious that it has much to do with non-linearity. This thesis aims to introduce various statistics that can be used to characterise the specific shape of the non-linearity observed in macroeconomic time series. Chapter 2 introduces a range of statistics and presents the dating algorithm used in this thesis, which is based on the BBQ algorithm of Harding and Pagan (2002). Chapter 3 tests the adequacy of linear models versus the SETAR model of van Dijk and Franses(2003) and the bounceback model of Kim, Morley and Piger (2005) in capturing observed non-linear features of the data. Chapter 4 extends this work by examining the three state Markov model of Hamilton (1989), again using the “bounce-back” model of Kim C., Morley, J. and J. Piger, (2005), and the more complicated “tension” model of DeJong, D., Dharmarajan, H., Liesenfeld, R. and Richard, J., (2005). Chapter 4 also extends Chapter 3 by estimating the above mentioned models on US GDP, Australian non-farm GDP, US investment and Australian dwellings investment. They are then simulated in order to gauge the cycle properties. Chapter 5 analyses the business cycle implications of two related multivariate dynamic factor models presented in papers by Kim and Piger (2001, 2002). Finally Chapter 6 concludes.

  • (2000) Wilson, Hugh David
    Thesis
    In this thesis the positive relationship between firm size and wages is investigated through the application of hierarchy theories. Many different explanations have been proposed for this relationship, but have met only limited success at best. The strongest finding to date is that unobserved ability is a significant factor. The question of interest here is why do wages increase as the size firm increases? Hierarchy theories take a different approach towards the analysis of firms in comparison to the alternate theories which have dominated previous investigations. As a result of their focus on the organisational relationships within a firm s internal structure, hierarchy theories offer certain insights to the size-wage relationship which to date have been unnoticed. An empirical investigation into the size-wage differential incorporating structural considerations into an augmented wage equation offers strong support for the propositions of hierarchy theories. I find that half of the firm size effect for workers can be explained by controlling for some aspects of management structure, and that span of control has a discontinuous effect on wages. These results are completely consistent with the existing findings on unobserved ability and have the added attraction of providing economic as well as statistical explanatory power.