Optimal alcohol taxes for Australia

Objective: To estimate welfare maximising tax rates for beer, wine, and spirits using a mathematical model that considers both the welfare loss alcohol taxes impose on non-abusive consumers and the welfare gains due to alcohol taxes reducing externality costs. Results: Optimal per litre of pure alcohol (LAL) tax rates are substantially different to both current alcohol tax rates and the uniform tax rate recommended as part of the 2010 Australian Government Tax Review. Given an individual consumer utility decision model, the best estimate values of the welfare maximising LAL tax rates are: $37 for beer,$11 for wine, $50 for spirits, and$77 for ready-to-drink spirits. Conclusion: As externality costs and the responsiveness of consumers to price changes are different for each alcohol type, community welfare is maximised by setting beverage specific LAL tax rates.Tax, Alcohol, Externalities, Demand and Price Analysis, Health Economics and Policy, I18, H23, H21,

Foxes in the Henhouse: An Exploratory Inquiry into Financial Markets Fraud

Conventional understandings of fraud are organized around the fraud triangle first developed in the 1950s by Cressey. This conceptual device remains central in our pedagogy and research on this especially timely topic. As long as fraud is imagined to be not much different than a stereotypical act by a single individual out of financial desperation and impulsiveness, the fraud triangle provides a reasonably powerful conceptual organization. However, when applied to abuses that occur in highly organized financial markets, its application takes on new meanings that push the boundaries of its usefulness. Using interviews with traders and other securities market participants, this paper concludes that the prospects for ill-gotten gain are much more systematic and the product of incomplete regulation

Expert opinion and cuisine reputation in the market for restaurant meals

As food is an experience good, the market for restaurant meals is a market where the cost of acquiring information regarding quality is relatively high. In such markets consumers often turn to reputation measures to guide purchase decisions. As Australia does not have a longstanding cuisine style of its own, and given Australia has been open to substantial immigration inflows since federation, it represents an especially appropriate market to study regarding the impact of individual restaurant reputation and collective cuisine reputation on meal prices. The following study uses the hedonic price approach to investigate the implicit price of individual reputation indicators, cuisine type reputation indicators, and other objective indicators in the market for restaurant meals. The empirical findings presented suggest that both individual restaurant reputation and cuisine type reputation are important. Other important factors are shown to include the quality of the restaurant wine list, the availability of private dining rooms, and whether or not there is an outdoor dining option.Expert Opinion, Food, Hedonic Pricing, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, D12, R22,

Expert opinion and cuisine reputation in the market for restaurant meals

As food is an experience good, the market for restaurant meals is a market where the cost of acquiring information regarding quality is relatively high. In such markets consumers often turn to reputation measures to guide purchase decisions. As Australia does not have a longstanding cuisine style of its own, and given Australia has been open to substantial immigration inflows since federation, it represents an especially appropriate market to study regarding the impact of individual restaurant reputation and collective cuisine reputation on meal prices. The following study uses the hedonic price approach to investigate the implicit price of individual reputation indicators, cuisine type reputation indicators, and other objective indicators in the market for restaurant meals. The empirical findings presented suggest that both individual restaurant reputation and cuisine type reputation are important. Other important factors are shown to include the quality of the restaurant wine list, the availability of private dining rooms, and whether or not there is an outdoor dining option.Expert Opinion, Food, Hedonic Pricing, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, D12, Q18, Z10,

Integrated 1 Year Mission: Investigators Face-to-Face

No abstract availabl

Sensitivity Analysis for Multiple Comparisons in Matched Observational Studies through Quadratically Constrained Linear Programming

A sensitivity analysis in an observational study assesses the robustness of significant findings to unmeasured confounding. While sensitivity analyses in matched observational studies have been well addressed when there is a single outcome variable, accounting for multiple comparisons through the existing methods yields overly conservative results when there are multiple outcome variables of interest. This stems from the fact that unmeasured confounding cannot affect the probability of assignment to treatment differently depending on the outcome being analyzed. Existing methods allow this to occur by combining the results of individual sensitivity analyses to assess whether at least one hypothesis is significant, which in turn results in an overly pessimistic assessment of a study's sensitivity to unobserved biases. By solving a quadratically constrained linear program, we are able to perform a sensitivity analysis while enforcing that unmeasured confounding must have the same impact on the treatment assignment probabilities across outcomes for each individual in the study. We show that this allows for uniform improvements in the power of a sensitivity analysis not only for testing the overall null of no effect, but also for null hypotheses on \textit{specific} outcome variables while strongly controlling the familywise error rate. We illustrate our method through an observational study on the effect of smoking on naphthalene exposure