Finally finished my PhD!
Hey TVHE. Back in the day I used to write on this site, but then all the interesting feedback and discussion on this site convinced me to do my PhD – and yesterday I finally got it awarded.
Just wanted to say thanks! If it wasn’t for the active discussion here and the passionate New Zealand economics community I would never have done it.
You can find a version of it here (and the archive here). And working paper versions of a number of the chapters:
- on NZ tax-transfer history,
- Vertical and Horizontal equity,
- imputing wages for those who aren’t working,
- estimating labour supply responses to changes in available net incomes,
- and decomposing changes in income inequality into tax and non-tax components.
I had meant to do posts on the issues here, but only really found time to write about the inequality measure I mainly used (the Gini coefficient) and a post on measuring vertical and horizontal equity.
Next year I will be back adding up some material from teaching 1st year economics at Victoria University of Wellington – I’ve been teaching the introductory micro and macro courses for a few years now as a teaching assistant, and will keep it going while I also do other work (as I love it).