Modelling Manufactured Exports: Evidence from Australian States

This paper looks at the determinants of national manufactured exports through the use of a panel of Australian states. The panel approach is taken to assess whether the coefficient instability present in direct estimates of export elasticities can be alleviated by utilising the cross-state variation present in both manufactured exports and their determinants. Estimates of the price elasticity using this approach are found to be relatively robust to the use of the mean-group or fixed-effects panel estimation, and to a range of different export demand specifications. Income elasticity estimates are found to be stable across models, but sensitive to the inclusion of other variables. However, the degree of coefficient instability is not found to be significantly less in panel models than when using direct estimates, suggesting that direct estimation remains appropriate. The analysis is then extended to consider the role that domestic factors play in determining manufactured exports. In line with theory, it is found that domestic final demand and capacity utilisation are inversely related to manufactured exports.manufactured exports; real exchange rates; regional

Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance

Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner. Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''. The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few. This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage. The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling

Co-movement of Australian State Business Cycles

We use a variety of techniques to examine the nature and degree of co-movement among Australian state business cycles. Our results indicate that these cycles move quite closely together, with particularly strong links between the cycles of the larger states. This finding is robust to a range of statistical measures. We also use an unobserved components model to attempt to distinguish the sources of this co-movement. An implication of our model is that the major source of cyclical fluctuation in state activity is shocks that are common to all states. Region-specific shocks appear to have a moderate influence on cyclical fluctuations, while spillovers of such shocks from one state to another seem to play only a minor role. These findings are consistent with the results of recent studies for the United States, Canada and Europe, where common shocks have also been found to dominate regional cyclical activity.business cycles; concordance; unobserved components

Modelling Inflation in Australia

This paper estimates a range of single-equation models of inflation for Australia. We find that traditional models, such as the expectations-augmented standard Phillips curve or mark-up models, outperform the more micro-founded New-Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) in explaining trimmed mean inflation, both in terms of in-sample fit and significance of coefficients. This in large part reflects the weak instruments problem in the estimation of the NKPC, and is partly corrected by including a direct measure of inflation expectations, but we still find that the unemployment rate or growth in marginal costs (unit labour cost and import prices) provides a better fit than either the output gap or level of real marginal costs. These traditional models also perform well in out-of-sample tests, relative to alternative models and some common benchmarks, with the standard Phillips curve clearly superior to these benchmarks on this test. As inflation has become better anchored and hence less variable, the magnitude of the errors of the single-equation models has declined, although the explanatory power (in terms of R-squared) has fallen together with this greater stability. We also investigate the empirical importance of some other variables that are commonly cited as determinants of inflation, and find little evidence that either commodity prices or the growth rate of money directly influence Australian underlying inflation.inflation; modelling

Still vacant after all these years – Evaluating the efficiency of property-led urban regeneration

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.Peer reviewedPostprin

The Axisymmetric Case for the Post-Newtonian Dedekind Ellipsoids

We consider the post-Newtonian approximation for the Dedekind ellipsoids in the case of axisymmetry. The approach taken by Chandrasekhar & Elbert (1974, 1978) excludes the possibility of finding a uniformly rotating (deformed) spheroid in the axially symmetric limit, though the solution exists at the point of axisymmetry. We consider an extension to their work that permits the possibility of such a limit.Comment: 12 pages, v1: more discussion of comparison to Chandrasekhar's and Elbert's work, modified to agree with published versio