Social Incentives Matter: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment , Tonin, Mirco (University of Southampton), Vlassopoulos, Michael (University of Southampton) Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as w...
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Via Matt Cowgill , I was pointed to this Nick Rowe post. An exerpt 1. Watch what happens on a really steep uphill bit of road. Watch what happens when the driver puts the pedal to the metal, and holds it there. Does the car slow down? If so, ironically, that confirms the theor...
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Dani Rodrik is one of the most interesting and fruitful economists of trade and development around. He's just put out a new paper on convergence in manufacturing. Not so long ago most people imagined that poor countries would converge towards the wealth of rich countries. In f...
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Here's a nice painting - which will be auctioned at Southerby's in Melbourne on the 14th Aug. More nice things to look at are here .
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New scientists Feedback page, 18th July issue, reports some recent research that has produced results so obvious that they might be brilliant. Why is it that Nigerian emails are so unbelievable ? The answer is that the extreme unbelievability of these messages automatically fi...
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The left-leaning twitterverse went into predictable convulsions of outrage yesterday when it emerged that (equally predictably) the four Coalition States had declined to pony up dollars for the 4 year trial phase of the proposed national disability insurance scheme. However th...
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[caption id="attachment_21086" align="alignright" width="300"] Debt was a very popular theme with Malcolm as well ...[/caption] Like Tony Abbott at a federal level, NT Country Liberals leader Terry Mills has been trying to fan the flames of a shock-horror theme on government d...
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Rules are thought to persist to the extent that the direct benefits of having them (e.g. reduced transactions costs) exceed the costs of enforcement and of occasional misapplications. We argue that a second crucial role of rules is as screening mechanisms for identifying coope...
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I've been reading Graham Freudenberg's Churchill and Australia which is a fine read, with a certain grandeur in the prose. In any event I came upon Chapter 10 which documents the crisis over Turkey pulling the plug on the post World War One settlement - a kind of between wars...
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[caption id="attachment_21050" align="alignright" width="300"] Gerry Wood[/caption] On the surface at least, nothing much has changed since my first two reports on the forthcoming Northern Territory election. The mainstream media campaign is very quiet indeed, even though it's...
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From the Journal of Economic Perspectives Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four t...
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Troppo author and prominent academic economist Paul Frijters has been banging away for years about how current climate change policies (including carbon pricing) are doomed to failure. The sincere (and entirely well founded) concerns of scientists and environmentalists about t...
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My son came home from last night's and this morning's hockey matches with a rainbow coloured band round his wrist with which he was playing on which were printed the words "Fair go, sport!" This is a pilot campaign launched last year by Sports Minister Mark Arbib and it's some...
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I've written before on the cancer of vox pop democracy , where all matters of policy must run the gauntlet of the vox pop test - which is to say that it must instantly appeal to a majority of shoppers at Fountain Gate who have a microphone shoved into their face and asked some...
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A conservative conspiracy to make government bigger, bury retailers in red tape and tell people how to live their lives, or just another example of populist grandstanding? The young man wanted a pack of cigarettes but when he pulled out his welfare card to pay, 65 year old cas...
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I've been thinking about writing something in the wake of Don Arthur's Nanny and the Libertarians post, but until now I haven't had the heart. Discussion threads on posts dealing with such issues always seem instantly to degenerate into a slanging match between, on the one han...
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Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers By: Shawn Cole (Harvard Business School, Finance Unit), Martin Kanz (World Bank) and Leora Klapper (World Bank) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hbs:wpaper:13-002&r=exp This p...
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Here's my column from today's SMH, Age and Brisbane Times. WHAT are Australia's strategic interests when negotiating with other countries on the extent of intellectual property (IP) rights - for instance, the duration and strength of patents and copyright? It's no Mickey Mouse...
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[gallery columns="1"] (Click on image to enlarge)
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Flash mob Barcelona style Annie I'm not your Daddy ,will put a spring in your day
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Almost everyone is in favour of equality of opportunity; even free market activists from the Institute of Public Affairs . But whenever a large number of people agree on a form of words, it's a safe bet they interpret those words differently. How else could party members agree...
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http://youtu.be/PUSdjfh2YjM
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[caption id="attachment_20927" align="alignright" width="300"] Father Frank Flynn (left)[/caption] I was deeply disturbed by Monday's Four Corners program on child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, not because it's any news as such but because very little seems to have changed...
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(Mike Pepperday has an edited version of the very interesting essay below in the AFR today. But Troppodillians expect only the unexpurgated, and so, in keeping with Troppo's tag line "What do we want - the unexpurgated. When do we want it - Now!" here it is. . Nicholas.) Austr...
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"In 2008-09, DEWHA was assessed as non-compliant for the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 and a post-implementation review is required to commence within one to two years of implementation."¹ The reason why the Artist Resale Royalty Act was assessed as non-comp...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4&feature=player_detailpage#t=320s Well folks, Yoram Bauman the stand-up economist whom you can see above and at his website is heading for Singapore in September and Tim Harcourt and I have been trying to get him to Australia. But to d...
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Well this confirms my own prejudices, and it may even be right! The Cost of Friendship Date: 2012-06 By: Paul Gompers Vladimir Mukharlyamov Yuhai Xuan This paper explores two broad questions on collaboration between individuals. First, we investigate what personal characterist...
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I stumbled upon this piece and voted in this online poll. I said I wasn't making any changes to my behaviour as a result of the carbon tax. But most people are! So far so good!
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The ABC has broadcast a two part doco on Woody Allen's life which I really loved. He's a remarkable person, and just keeps churning out films, great, good, bad and indifferent. In any event by the end of watching this documentary I was an admirer of his, not just of his films,...
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The 21st was supposed to be the age of flying cars, teleporters and affordable space travel, says David Graeber . But now here we are in the future still arguing about overcrowded trains and the price of petrol. David Graeber feels cheated: Where ... are the flying cars? Where...
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Amidst all the kerfuffle about asylum seeker policy over the last week, it probably escaped most people's attention that the Gillard government's Orwellian Newspeak-rebadged version of the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, called " Stronger Futures ", passed through P...
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The Coalition is engaged in further hypocrisy. 1. The Coalition (both under Howard and more recently through Morrison’s own words) has supported Nairu as an appropriate venue well before Nairu had signed the UN Convention on Refugees. 2. The current Abbott policy still does no...
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