Playing to the peanut gallery

Opposition spokesman Andrew Robb responds to a paper published by the NBER by saying that

It’s a very shonky piece of work, it’s amateur hour,’ 

‘Some young bloke’s done his best but it’s a joke.’

And that, in a nutshell, is the oppositions considered response.

So what is the NBER?

The NBER is the nation's leading nonprofit economic research organization. Sixteen of the 31 American Nobel Prize winners in Economics and six of the past Chairmen of the President's Council of Economic Advisers have been researchers at the NBER. The more than 1,000 professors of economics and business now teaching at colleges and universities in North America who are NBER researchers are the leading scholars in their fields. These Bureau associates concentrate on four types of empirical research: developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior, assessing the economic effects of public policies, and projecting the effects of alternative policy proposals.

And who is co author Douglas Shackelford?

Douglas Shackelford is the Meade H. Willis Distinguished Professor of Taxation and director of the UNC Tax Center. His research and teaching address taxes and business strategy.

Current areas of interest include the effects of shareholder taxes on equity prices, the taxation of multinationals and the disclosure of corporate tax information. He has published widely in accounting, economics and finance journals.

Dr. Shackelford is a research associate in public economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. He has held visiting faculty positions at Stanford University and Universiteit Maastricht in the Netherlands.

A CPA, he was a senior tax consultant with Arthur Andersen in Boston and Greensboro from 1981-85.

He received his PhD from the University of Michigan and his BS from UNC-Chapel Hill.

And who is Andrew Robb? - a politician