Mark N. Harris

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• PhD Monash, BA Sussex
• Professor at Curtin University

We use a rigorous three-stage many-analysts design to assess how different researcher decisions-specifically data cleaning, research design, and the interpretation of a policy question-affect the variation in estimated treatment effects. A total of 146 research teams each completed the same causal inference task three times each: first with few con...

Using survey data from Australia, this paper examines whether the economic relationship, complements versus substitutes, between cannabis and tobacco varies over the life cycle. They are often consumed as a ‘bundle,’ but using a range of approaches, we find compelling evidence that these goods are complements at younger ages and change to substitut...

With Indigenous populations at risk of higher rates of infection and more serious disease than non-Indigenous populations, a policy of returning to remote communities (i.e. Return to Country) was encouraged during the COVID-19 pandemic. This policy led to high expectations for remote communities to meet the often diverse and complex needs of return...

With Indigenous populations at risk of higher rates of infection and more serious disease than non-Indigenous populations, a policy of returning to remote communities (i.e. Return to Country) was encouraged during the COVID-19 pandemic. This policy led to high expectations for remote communities to meet the often diverse and complex needs of return...

This chapter examines various estimation and testing issues concerning models with endogenous regressors. The complexity of these issues increases as the number of potential unobserved heterogeneities increases with the dimension of the data. The chapter examines the properties of least squares type estimators, including theWithin estimator, under...

This chapter discusses the specification, estimation and testing of dynamic models with multi-dimensional data. The difficulties in estimating dynamic models in standard two-dimensional panel data are well known and these challenges are exacerbated by the more complicated endogeneity problems associated with using multi-dimensional data. Furthermor...

In this paper panel data is used to estimate the relationship between geographic reference income and subjective wellbeing in Australia. Recent cross-sectional US-based studies suggest that the income of other people in a neighbourhood—geographic reference income—impacts on individual wellbeing but is mediated by geographic scale. On controlling fo...

The offshore oil and gas working environment is an inherently dangerous one, with risks posed to physical safety on a daily basis. One neglected field of research is the added psychosocial stressors present in this environment. This research examined the experiences of offshore oil and gas workers through one-on-one online interviews which were rec...

This qualitative study was conducted with the aim of identifying psychosocial hazards in Australian offshore oil and gas facilities. Twenty-nine offshore oil and gas workers were interviewed via video link. Results indicated that, apart from the presence of a high-risk work environment as a source of mental and physical strain, there are organisati...

The offshore oil and gas working environment is an inherently dangerous one, with risks posed to physical safety on a daily basis. One neglected field of research is the added psychosocial stressors present in this environment. This research examined the experiences of offshore oil and gas workers through one-on-one online interviews which were rec...

Purpose Whilst computed tomography (CT) imaging has been a vital component of injury management, its increasing use has raised concern regarding ionising radiation exposure. This study aims to identify latent classes (underlying patterns) of CT use over a 3-year period following the incidence of injury and factors predicting the observed patterns....

We explore the finding that households often expect their financial position to remain unchanged compared to other alternatives. A generalized middle inflated ordered probit ( GMIOP ) model is used to account for the tendency of individuals to choose “neutral” responses when faced with opinion‐based questions. Our analysis supports the use of a GMI...

This qualitative study aimed to identify mental health hazards in the offshore oil and gas industry, as well as the role of the personality types of the Five Factor Model (FFM) in coping with these stressors. A focus group with 8 participants and a pilot study with 5 participants were conducted. Results showed that several stressors are currently p...

We provide new evidence of international spillover of US monetary policy considering three transmission channels in an integrated framework. In this framework, we use a comprehen- sive dynamic time and frequency domain analysis and identify the main transmission channel (spillover) of US monetary policy to be through interest rates followed by asse...

We introduce the latent class modelling approach to the analysis of financial portfolio diversification at the household level. We explore portfolio allocation in Great Britain using household panel data based on a nationally representative sample of the population, namely the Wealth and Assets Survey. The latent class aspect of the model splits ho...

This chapter introduces machine learning (ML) approaches to estimate nonlinear econometric models, such as discrete choice models, typically estimated by maximum likelihood techniques. Two families of ML methods are considered in this chapter. The first, shrinkage estimators and related derivatives, such as the Partially Penalised Estimator, introd...

This study assess the measurement of crowding in Australia and explores the relationships between various household density measures and the wellbeing of occupants. Indicators of the incidence or severity of household crowding in Australia actually measure occupant density—the ratio of occupants to available space—rather than crowding, which relate...

This study assess the measurement of crowding in Australia and explores the relationships between various household density measures and the wellbeing of occupants. Indicators of the incidence or severity of household crowding in Australia actually measure occupant density—the ratio of occupants to available space—rather than crowding, which relate...

This paper aims to better understand why individuals tend to select items at the top of lists. Within a natural field experiment, we randomize the order in which new economics research papers are presented in email alerts and measure the subsequent download activity. Our novel disaggregate data allows us to evidence i) how position effects vary acr...

Many empirical analyses of firms' speeds of leverage adjustment (SOA) impose a strong constraint: an average SOA is estimated for all firms in a sample. We demonstrate the usefulness of finite mixture models (FMM) in corporate finance by analysing estimates of firms' SOA. Applying FMM to a sample of US firms during 1972–2017, we find five distinct...

We explore the empirical relationship between borrowing constraints and household financial portfolio allocation. To motivate our analysis we develop a mean-variance model of portfolio allocation with three tradable asset classes defined by increasing risk, and establish a link between borrowing restrictions and financial portfolio allocation at th...

Objective Continuity and regularity of general practitioner (GP) contacts are associated with reduced hospitalisation in type 2 diabetes (T2DM). We assessed associations of these GP contact patterns with intermediate outcomes reflecting patient monitoring and health. Design Observational longitudinal cohort study using general practice data 2011–2...

Focus of Presentation This project showcases the use of existing general practice (GP) datasets to gain access to large-scale data for epidemiological research. There is limited quantitative research on antibiotic prescribing in Australian GP. The research question involves identifying predictors of antibiotic prescribing not in accordance with nat...

Measures of mental health are heavily relied upon to identify at-risk individuals. However, self-reported mental health metrics might be unduly affected by misreporting (perhaps stemming from stigma effects). In this article, we consider this phenomenon by focusing upon the mis-reporting of mental health using UK panel data from 1991 to 2018. In se...

We investigate how recently developed measures of uncertainty affect the voting behavior of individual Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members. To determine the precise impact of uncertainty on individual policymakers, we estimate the standard errors of member‐specific parameters in a random parameters ordered probit framework. We f...

Background This study evaluated changes in regularity of general practitioner (GP) contact (the pattern of visits over time) and the impact of regularity on diabetes-related hospitalisation following introduction of care co-ordination incentives. Methods Linked primary care, hospital and death records covered West Australian adults from 1991–2004....

Analysing the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Health and Retirement Study, we investigate the extent to which US households reduce their financial risk exposure when confronted with background risk. Our novel modelling approach – termed a deflated ordered fractional model – quantifies how the overall composition of a household portfolio with...

We explore the effects of health and healthcare utilization on household saving and financial portfolios using data from the Japanese Household Panel Survey and the Keio Household Panel Survey. Poor psychological well-being is found to be associated with lower levels of savings and smaller financial portfolios, whereas associations with poor physic...

Measures of mental health are heavily relied upon to identify at-risk individuals. However, self-reported mental health metrics might be unduly a§ected by misreporting (perhaps stemming from stigma e§ects). In this paper, we consider this phenomenon by focusing upon the mis-reporting of mental health using UK panel data from 1991-2018. In separate...

A new method is proposed for generating projections for sparse populations by locality, age cohort and gender. An adaptation of the cohort replacement method, the approach uses a Tobit model with varying censoring limits to model population changes by cohort. As an applied example, projections are generated for 2016 Indigenous populations in commun...

Within Australia’s larger cities, we observe differences in price dynamics across different sub-periods over the period 2001–2016. A combination of housing market cycles, policy reforms and different new supply configurations offers potential explanations. Neighbourhood dwelling prices within all cities and dwelling types converged during a 2001–20...

Background: Previous research has documented that unemployed individuals who engage in recreational activities, either alone or with others, experience higher levels of mental health and psychological well-being relative to those who do not engage in recreational activities. Aims: In this study, we examined whether engagement in health promoting ac...

Objectives: This study investigated spinal pain-related absenteeism at age 17 as a potential precursor to work presenteeism at age 23. Methods: A longitudinal study was performed with Raine Study Gen2 participants (n = 451). Spinal pain-related absenteeism from school/work was collected at the 17 year follow-up. Presenteeism (due to ill-health o...

We provide novel evidence on the effects of ill‐health on the dynamics of labour state transitions by considering retirement as mobility between full‐time work, part‐time work, self‐employment and inactivity. We employ a dynamic multi‐state model which accounts for state dependence and different types of unobservables. Our model allows for both ind...

Collection and analysis of self-reported information on an ordered Likert scale is ubiquitous across the social sciences. Inference from such analyses are valid where the responses scale employed means the same thing to all individuals. That is, if there is no differential item functioning (DIF) present in the data. A priori this is unlikely to hol...

The anchoring vignette approach has grown in popularity as a method to ad- just for reporting heterogeneity in self-reported survey questions, removing bias due to systematic variation in reporting styles across study respondents. The use of anchoring vignettes, however, has been limited to surveys where both self-reports and vignette questions hav...

Using a dataset from the State Bank of Pakistan containing each and every commercial loan generated in the economy from 2006 to 2013, we find that, on average, a longer relationship length is associated with lower risk premiums but higher collateral requirements. However, further examination paints a far more complex picture. The impact of relation...

This paper sheds light on the role of immigration policies in shaping immigration flows in responses to labor market changes. Using data from Australia during the 2001 to 2015 commodity cycle as a quasi-experiment, we find that employer-sponsored (demand-driven) immigration varied in line with commodity prices, with commodity-intensive states witne...

Objectives To evaluate the relationship between the proportion of time under the potentially protective effect of a general practitioner (GP) captured using the Cover Index and diabetes-related hospitalisation and length of stay (LOS). Design An observational cohort study over two 3-year time periods (2009/2010–2011/2012 as the baseline and 2012/2...

Zero‐inflated ordered probit (ZIOP) and middle‐inflated ordered probit (MIOP) models are finding increasing favour in the discrete choice literature. We propose generalizations to these models – which collapse to their ZIOP/MIOP counterparts under a set of simple parameter restrictions – with respect to the inflation process. These generalizations...

Using British panel data, we explore the Finding that households often expect their financial position to remain unchanged compared to other alternatives, using a generalised middle inflated ordered probit (GMIOP) model. In doing so we account for the tendency of individuals to choose ‘neutral’ responses when faced with attitudinal and opinion-base...

Given the increasing prevalence of adult obesity, furthering understanding of the determinants of measures such as Body Mass Index (BMI) remains high on the policy agenda. We contribute to existing literature on modelling BMI by proposing an extension to latent class modelling, which serves to unveil a more detailed picture of the determinants of B...

Price reviews are a potentially costly activity. A significant fraction of unchanged prices may stem from firms not reviewing prices, rather than from obstacles to changing prices per se, such as menu costs. In this paper, we disentangle these two causes of price stickiness by estimating an inflated ordered probit model on a panel of French manufac...

Background Continuity of care with a general practitioner (GP) is vital for management of chronic conditions including diabetes as it provides proactive care facilitating opportunities to prevent or delay progression of disease. Aim To capture the proportion of time people with diabetes are under the protective effect of contact with a GP using...

Background and rationale We have previously reported decreased rates and costs of diabetes-related hospitalisations with increasing regularity of general practitioner (GP) contact. However previous work has not adjusted for continuity of provider. Thus, despite the relevance for policy development, whether increased regularity is actually a proxy...

Objectives This study aimed to determine the extent of both multimorbidity and work productivity loss among young adults with paid work and to analyze their association. Methods We included 604 participants from a follow-up of the Raine Study that comprised a cohort who were 22 years at the time (Gen2-22). Information on 36 health conditions, group...

Background: Studies examine longitudinal continuity of GP contact though few consider 'regularity of GP contact', i.e., the dispersion of contacts over time. Increased regularity may indicate planned ongoing care. Current measures of regularity may be correlated with the number of contacts and may not isolate the phenomenon of interest. Objective...

Objective: To assess the association between continuity of provider-adjusted regularity of general practitioner (GP) contact and unplanned diabetes-related hospitalisation or emergency department (ED) presentation. Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Individual-level linked self-report and administrative health service data from New South...

Background Literature highlighted the importance of timely access and ongoing care provided at primary care settings in reducing hospitalisation and health care resource uses. However, the effect of timely access to primary care has not been fully captured in most of the current continuity of care indices. This study aimed to develop a time-duratio...

We propose and estimate several discrete choice models of monetary policy decision‐making that feature time‐varying inertia. The models permit us to account for three stylized facts characterizing monetary policymaking in the United States: (1) target interest rates are gradually adjusted in small discrete movements, (2) there are some long stretch...

Introduction There is a small body of literature examining the relationship between “regularity” of contact with General Practitioners (GPs), i.e. the pattern of visits over time, and health outcomes. Methods previously used to measure regularity may be conflated with the number of GP visits (frequency) which may impact on effect estimates. Object...

Measures of mental wellbeing are heavily relied upon to identify at-risk individuals. However, self-reported mental health metrics might be unduly affected by mis-reporting (perhaps stemming from stigma effects). In this paper we consider this phenomenon using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and its successor, Understanding Soci...

Introduction Enhancement of primary care has been focused in many countries to make the healthcare system more productive in response to increasing burden of chronic conditions. Despite tremendous growth of linked administrative data, methods to use the administrative data to evaluate and improve the performance of primary care have been limited....

Studies of the Australian graduate labour market have found a substantial incidence of, and significant earnings effects from, vertical mismatch. This study extends the literature by examining horizontal mismatch, an important dimension of mismatch in its own right and which has been less studied. Over a quarter of Australian graduates are found to...

Studies of the Australian graduate labour market have found a substantial incidence of, and significant earnings effects from, vertical mismatch. This study extends the literature by examining horizontal mismatch, an important dimension of mismatch in its own right and which has been less studied. Over a quarter of Australian graduates are found to...

This paper compares immigration flows in response to changes in labour market conditions to provide an assessment of Australia's selective immigration policies. We find employer-sponsored immigration varied in line with changes in regional wages, with immigrants being drawn to states with greater wage growth. In contrast, evidence does not support...

This paper compares immigration flows in response to changes in labour market conditions to provide an assessment of Australia's selective immigration policies. We find employer-sponsored immigration varied in line with changes in regional wages, with immigrants being drawn to states with greater wage grown. In contrast, evidence does not support t...

This paper compares immigration flows in response to changes in labour market conditions to provide an assessment of Australia’s selective immigration policies. We find employer sponsored immigration varied in line with changes in regional wages, with immigrants being drawn to states with greater wage grown. In contrast, evidence does not support t...

Aims: We aimed to characterise use of general practitioners (GP) simultaneously across multiple attributes in people with diabetes and examine its impact on diabetes related potentially preventable hospitalisations (PPHs). Methods: Five-years of panel data from 40,625 adults with diabetes were sourced from Western Australian administrative healt...

Zero-in‡ated ordered probit (ZIOP) and middle-in‡ated ordered probit (MIOP) models are finding increasing favour in the discrete choice literature. Both models consist of a mixture of binary and single ordered probit equations, the combination of which accounts for an "excessive" build-up of observations in a given choice category. We propose gener...

Journalistic summary of some recent drug reporting research in JRSS A and Health Economics journals

Introduction For many, spinal pain first develops during adolescence. However, the extent to which adolescent spinal pain impacts work absenteeism later in life is largely unknown. We assessed the association of spinal pain in adolescence with work absenteeism in early adulthood, using a population-based cohort. Methods Data from a sample of worki...

Background: When information on changes in address or migration of people to or from a study jurisdiction is unavailable in longitudinal studies, issues relating to loss-to-follow-up and misclassification bias may result. This study investigated how estimations of associations between general practitioner (GP) contact and hospital use were affecte...

When modelling “social bads,” such as illegal drug consumption, researchers are often faced with a dependent variable characterised by a large number of zero observations. Building on the recent literature on hurdle and double-hurdle models, we propose a double-inflated modelling framework, where the zero observations are allowed to come from the f...

This chapter examines various estimation and testing issues concerning models with endogenous regressors. The complexity of these issues increases as the number of potential unobserved heterogeneities increases with the dimension of the data. The chapter examines the properties of least squares type estimators, including theWithin estimator, under...

This chapter discusses the specification, estimation and testing of dynamic models with multi-dimensional data. The difficulties in estimating dynamic models in standard two-dimensional panel data are well known and these challenges are exacerbated by the more complicated endogeneity problems associated with using multi-dimensional data. Furthermor...

Analysing the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we present a new empirical method to investigate the extent to which households reduce their financial risk exposure when confronted with background risk. Our novel modelling approach - termed a deflated fractional ordered probit model - quantifies how the overall asset composition in a portfolio adj...

We contribute to the small, but important, literature exploring the incidence and implications of mis-reporting in survey data. SpeciÖcally, when modelling ìsocial badsî, such as illegal drug consumption, researchers are often faced with exceptionally low reported participation rates. We propose a modelling framework where Örstly an individual deci...

We examine loan defaults by firms and identify the factors that influence both the default resolution process and firms' access to fresh credit after firms exit default. Using a dataset of all commercial loans made in Pakistan from 2006 to 2013, we find an important role for collateral. Collateral expedites both the default resolution process and a...

This paper explores how remittances influence happiness among migrants and their households of origin. It is based on a novel data set of matched samples of Bangladeshi migrant households (living in the UK and Malaysia) and their origin families in Bangladesh. Empirical findings suggest that remittances play a significant role in stimulating migran...

Self-assessed measures of health using Likert-type scales are widely used to assess the health and well-being of populations, and are a feature of household surveys throughout the world. However, the self-reported and subjective nature of these measures means that different people will inherently respond in different ways - a concept known as repor...

We explore the misuse of pharmaceutical drugs in the Australian workforce, focusing on whether any differences exist between workers in particular industries or occupations. In terms of industry, being employed in hospitality is positively associated with pharmaceutical drug misuse, while being employed in finance, insurance and retail is inversely...

This paper focuses on the self-reported responses given to survey questions of the form "Overall, how would you rate your health?" with typical response items being on a scale ranging from poor to excellent. Usually, the overwhelming majority of responses fall in either the middle category or the one immediately to the "right" of this (for example,...

We introduce the (panel) zero-inflated interval regression (ZIIR) model, which is ideally suited when data are in the form of groups, which is commonly the case in survey data, and there is an ‘excess’ of zero observations. We apply our new modelling framework to the analysis of visits to general practitioners (GPs) using individual-level panel dat...

This paper considers the relationship between social capital and health in the years before, at and after retirement. This adds to the current literature that only investigates this relationship in either the population as a whole or two subpopulations, pre-retirement and post-retirement. We now investigate if there are further additional subpopula...

We extend the discrete data latent class literature by explicitly defining a latent variable for class membership as a function of both observables and unobservables, thereby allowing the equations defining the class membership and observed outcomes to be correlated. The procedure is then applied to modelling observed obesity outcomes, based upon a...

Latent class, or finite mixture, modelling has proved a very popular, and relatively easy, way of introducing much-needed heterogeneity into empirical models right across the social sciences. The technique involves (probabilistically) splitting the population into a finite number of (relatively homogeneous) classes, or types. Within each of these,...

We introduce the (panel) zero-inflated interval regression (ZIIR) model, which is ideally suited when data are in the form of groups, which is commonly the case in survey data, and there is an ‘excess’ of zero observations. We apply our new modelling framework to the analysis of visits to general practitioners (GPs) using individual-level panel dat...

This paper proposes a discrete-choice behavioural model of labour supply to examine the role of ill-health on single parents’ employment. The model provides estimates of individual preferences over a given set of labour market states and allows these preferences to be influenced by a measure of mental health, a latent health index purged of reporti...

Since the mid‐1990s there has been a proliferation of empirical models in the trade literature. Focus has ranged from the effect of particular explanatory variables to improved econometric techniques. However, there appears to be a lack of analyses on large international trade datasets aiming at describing the “stylized facts” of observed bilateral...

Using household-level data, we explore the relationship between donations to the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and other charitable donations. The empirical evidence suggests that donations specifically for the victims of the tsunami are positively associated with the amount previously donated to other charitable causes, which a...

We extend Harris and Zhao (2007) by proposing a (Panel) Inflated Ordered Probitmodel, and demonstrate its usefulness by applying it to Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee voting data.

Discrete variables that have an inherent sense of ordering across outcomes are commonly found in large datasets available to many economists, and are often the focus of research. However, assumptions underlying the standard Ordered Probit (which is usually used to analyse such variables) are not always justied by the data. This study provides a rev...

This paper employs a dynamic multinomial choice framework to provide new evidence on the effect of health on labour market transitions among older individuals. We consider retirement as a multi-state process and examine the effects of ill-health and health shocks on mobility between full-time employment, part-time employment, self-employment and in...

We make a methodological contribution to the latent class literature by re-examining censored variable analysis within a panel data context. Specifically, we extend the standard latent class tobit panel approach to include random effects, to allow for heteroskedasticity and to incorporate the inverse hyperbolic sine (IHS) transformation of the depe...