Introduction

This volume is a Special Issue of the Economic Record that contains papers selected from those which were presented at the 36th Australian Conference of Economists, held in Hobart from 24 to 26 September 2007. The conference was held under the auspices of the Economic Society of Australia (Tasmanian Branch). The members of the organising committee were Paul Blacklow (Chair), Don Challen, Peter Johnson, Rene Jones, Kate Kent, Kelly Madden, Ranjan Ray, Hugh Sibly and Graeme Wells.

The conference included five keynote lectures (by Richard Blundell, Anne Krueger, Dilip Mookherjee, Christopher Pissarides and Catherine Mann); 10 Special Sessions (organised by Ken Clements, Neil Campbell, Lorraine Dearden, Mardi Dungey, Chris Foster, Chris Lock, Yew-Kwang Ng, Sue Richardson, Bob Rutherford, and Hugh Sibly); and 44 contributed-paper sessions. All 145 contributed papers were refereed before acceptance.

The leading paper in this issue is by one of the keynote speakers, Professor Dilip Mookherjee of Boston University. 43 authors of contributed papers asked that their papers be considered for the Special Issue. The editors made a preliminary assessment of the submitted papers and then sent 30 to referees for detailed consideration – 11 of these were accepted for this issue. Because of space constraints, one of these 11 articles will be published in a later quarterly issue of the Economic Record. The editors thank the authors and referees for meeting the tight deadlines imposed on them.

The referees were: Gary Barrett, Bryn Battersby Alison Booth, Tim Brailsford, Michael Brooks, Debajyoti Chakrabarty, Deborah Cobb-Clark, Arusha Cooray, Mardi Dungey, Mark Crosby, Denise Doiron, Paul Flatau, Dietrich Fausten, Chris Findlay, Tue Gorgens, Hal Hill, Raja Junankar, Stephen King, Tom Kompas, Jan Libich, Bruce Felmingham, Denzil Fiebig, Kevin Fox, Robyn Iredale, Quentin Grafton, Nic Groenewold, Jarkko Jaaskela, Sarah Jennings, Geoff Kingston, John Madden, Lisa Magnani, Chris Manning, Paul Miller, Daehoon Nahm, Nilss Olekalns, Dean Parham, Satya Paul, John Quiggin, Maria Racionero, Peter Robertson, Chris Ryan, Martin Richardson, Elizabeth Savage, Jeff Sheen, Hugh Sibly, Mahinda Siriwardena, Thanasis Stengos, Max Tani, Rod Tyers, Graham Voss and Stephen Whelan.