When everything had gone wrong and Homer Simpson couldn’t afford Christmas presents for the family, he took a punt. He went to the dog track and bet on a promisingly named greyhound: Santa’s Little Helper. Read more

Damien Grant isn’t normally the one making the case that the government needs to take more in tax. The liquidator and libertarian-minded columnist over at the Sunday Star Times more typically wants what libertarians generally want – a government that spends less and that can let each of us keep more of our own money. Read more

When plans to abolish regional councils were first rumoured, I was more than mildly sceptical. It isn’t that I’m a giant fan of regional councils; I couldn’t name more than a couple of my own regional councillors, and I bet most of you can’t either. Read more

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that four Uber drivers have actually been Uber employees all along. In the Court’s view, Uber had enough control over those drivers’ businesses that they couldn’t be considered contractors. Read more

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that Uber did not merely facilitate connections between four drivers and their various passengers – as Uber has maintained. And that the four drivers were not contractors for Uber either. Read more

Announcements earlier this month make the Emissions Trading Scheme a bit less credible over the longer term. The problem can be fixed – and relatively easily. Read more

A commissioned report released this past week revealed a fact you may find surprising. Rules stopping a stadium from hosting many events cause an enormous amount of forgone revenue over time. Read more

Sometimes, policy work is like wishing on a cursed wish-granting monkey’s paw. Like the one in the old Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode, later parodied in The Simpsons. Read more

Illicit tobacco might now make up more than a quarter of New Zealand’s tobacco market. There are no wholly reliable numbers on the size of illicit markets. Read more

There’s a very old saying that taxation is the science of plucking the chicken without making it squawk. The earliest form of the saying seems to go back to a 1766 letter from French economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot to David Hume – though the exact origins are disputed. Read more

New Zealand has an awful lot of odd little cartels. At least if we define ‘cartels’ using an economist’s definition rather than a lawyer’s definition. Read more