Working Papers 1999 – Abstracts

5/99
Inter- Regional Migration in Australia: An Applied Economic Analysis
Jane Fry, Tim R. L. Fry and Matthew W. Peter

In analysing the effects of economic policy in a Federal system, such as Australia, it is important to understand the interactions between the States and Territories. In particular, given that there is free movement between labour markets, to analyse economic policy it is important to understand the factors influencing inter- regional migration. In this paper we use data from 1982 to 1996 to estimate a structural econometric model of inter- regional migration. The results are then used to re- specify and calibrate the Computable General Equilibrium model MONASH- MRF. This then provides a more detailed picture of labour market responses when we subsequently simulate the response of net interstate migration to changes in State Government spending.

6/99
Estimating Advertising Half- life and the Data Interval Bias
Tim R. L. Fry, Simon Broadbent and Janine M. Dixon

We compare three methods of estimating the duration, or half- life, of how well each method works with the data aggregated over different time intervals. In contrast with the existing theory on the, so called, data interval bias, our experiments are based upon realistic advertising schedules. Our results appear to indicate that the indirect "t- ratio" estimating procedure favoured by practitioners works well in the presence of such temporal aggregation. Additionally, we suggest a transformation that can be used in combination with the indirect "t- ratio" estimating procedure to obtain estimates of the underlying microperiod half- life from a variety of common (macro) data frequencies.

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