Economic Rigor

Well, the results of the second test were pretty convincing....Australia wins. And once again I will go to my old friend the z-score to try and explain why this is... It appears in the batting, you either played well or had a shocker. Only 3 players had standard ok games (z-scores of between 0.5 and -0.5)...Marsh, Pujara and Vihari In Batting, quality players (z-score of > 0.5 SD) V Kohli (INDIA) - z-score of 2.58 MS Harris (AUS) - z-score of 1.26 AM Rahane (INDIA) - z-score of  1.02 TM Head (AUS) - z-score of 0.92 UT Khawaja (AUS) - z-score of  0.92 TD Paine (AUS) - z-score of 0.86 AJ Finch (AUS) - z-score of 0.86 RR Pant (INDIA) - z-score of 0.63 Kohli showed his class this game, and again Rahane was effective. For Australia, most of the top 6 got runs. The dodgy players (z-score of Mohammed Shami (INDIA) - z-score of -1.12 I Sharma (INDIA) - z-score of -1.09 KL Rahul (INDIA) - z-score of -1.07 JJ Bumrah (INDIA) -...

ATO published their annual tax data for Australian companies earning over 100 Million in Revenue, and again, it is very eye opening in regards to the IT Industry in Australia. I did this analysis back in 2015, but decided to do it again in 2018 to see how it has changed. And change it has. About 10% of the revenue value appears to have been wiped off the industry. In 2013/14, the combined Managed Services biggies appeared to pull in $15.7 billion. Now it is only $14.2 billion. That's destruction of $1.5 billion out of the industry. Huge. And its easy to see who the biggest losers are. IBM and HP. IBM Australia went from having revenues of $4.6 billion in 2013/2014 to $3.3 billion in 2016/2017. A drop of 28% over 3 years. HP Australia was worse though...revenues of $3.1 billion in 2013/2014 down to 1.6 billion in 2016/2017. A drop of 48%! And its interesting to see the various strategies being employed by those MS providers to survice. It appears Accenture and Data3 have p...

Well India takes first blood as I predicted. Played well. Australia stayed in it, but our top order looks dicey. Wanted to perform a statistical analysis about who played the best. So I turn to my trusty friend, the z-score (score-average/SD), to give me the good oil. On the batting, if I calculate the z-score on total runs...we only have 3 players who batted with a z-score of over 0.5 (which is my benchmark for quality play) CA Pujara: z-score of 3.1!!! TM Head - z-score of 1 AM Rahane - z-score of 0.93 On the poor performing side we have 5 players who had poor batting displays JR Hazlewood: z-score of -0.83 AJ Finch: z-score of -0.89 Mohammed Shami: z-score of -1.02 I Sharma: z-score of -1.07 JJ Bumrah: z-score of  -1.17 Finch had a shocker. Needs to do better than this as an opening batsman. The rest are bowlers so can be forgiven. On the bowling side, if I calculate the z-score on wickets/runs (i.e the inverse of average), we get the f...

Taking a break from my economic analysis to have a quick statistical analysis of the Cricket playing today, Australia vs India in the first test. India looks like they have bought a pretty good squad with them this year, and Australia is looking a bit raw. Here are the pertinent AUS stats As you can see, a pretty inexperienced squad with some low batting numbers. Bowling looks ok though. Compare that to the IND stats Indians are younger, more experienced, have some serious guns in the batting and have a bowling attack that equals ours. Doesn't look good. While I would usually back Australia at home, I think we might be in trouble this year.

Paris is in flames at the moment, mainly due to their economy. And Macron believes increasing taxes is going to pull the economy out of the malaise. Unlikely based on historic events. The only way France is going to grow is if they can increase their hours worked. Taxes aren't going to help.