Economic Rigor

Every day in the newspapers and on talk back radio there are tales of suicide in rural Australia due to the drought. These claims seem to be accepted as facts, rather than being challenged. I would have thought that if drought was causing increased suicides we would see them in the ABS causes of death statistics in those drought years. So I pulled out my trusty stats, and, using Dubbo average rainfall from the BOM as a proxy for drought, looked for drought years. I have defined drought years as daily average rainfall that is 2 Standard Deviations from the 30 year average. This produced the following list of drought years, and the equivalent difference from the 30 year average suicide rate (which is 12 per 100,000 people). Suicide rate was from the ABS causes of death release So based on my analysis, I have drought years being 1982, 1997, 2002, 2006 and 2018. These years (googled) all appear to have been classified as drought. So if I run a regression on this to see what th...

Wise Tech has been in the news a bit after analysts have released some research saying it is overstating its income. Hard to really say that for mine. But there is no doubt there are some irregularities. Firstly, the capitalisation of R&D expenses...over the last 2 years Wise Tech has capitalised the R&D by around $80 million. If those expenses were expensed in the P&L instead, you would have reduced the NPAT over those 2 years from $101 million to $20 million. Meaning that the return on Equity would reduce from 9% to 1.8% with a dividend payout ration of around 15%, that means organic growth would only be around 1.5% Not much debt happening so the rest would be acquisition of businesses via share placements. And you do see that in the accounts. Share Capital has gone from $166 million in 2017 to $668 million in 2019. Then we also have the Goodwill impairment. Goodwill Balance at the moment is $600 million...basically 53% of total assets. That is high historically for I...

Happy Countries are Rich Countries. I gathered the figures from the UN sustainability report. So every decrease in GDP Per Capita Rating, reduces the happiness rating by around 20%. Note any countries above the line are less happier than they should be. Those below are happier than they should be. Somalia is an interesting one.