In this paper we highlight the relevance of work-related training to the minimum wage debate. We initially situate training incidence within the broader picture of the earnings distribution in Britain and demonstrate that lower-paid workers are less likely than workers towards the top of the...

This essay attempts to quantify and explain the economic performance of the Great South Land – later called Australia – from the first migrations some 60,000 years ago to the present, and beyond. A general dynamic theory – the ‘dynamic-strategy’ theory – has been employed to provide...

Using the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Survey of Income and Household Costs, this paper explores the effect of changing assortative mating patterns on income inequality. Evidence from theoretical and mathematically calibrated models suggest that assortative mating has distributional...

We use the first three waves of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey to examine the retirement plans of middle-aged workers (aged 45-55). Our results indicate that approximately two-thirds of men and more then half of women appear to be making standard retirement...

This paper traces the process whereby the apprenticeship system came to be regulated by industrial tribunals during the period 1900 to 1930. It describes how the regulation emerged, the motives that underpinned it, and the wider political debate about the apprenticeship system at the time. It...

How much do non-medical factors affect the timing of conceptions, births and deaths? To test this, we estimate the effect of the millennium on conceptions, births and deaths. With a highly flexible empirical specification, we find large and significant increases in conceptions and births, and...

Using taxation statistics, we estimate the income share held by top income groups in Australia over the period 1921-2002. We find that the income share of the richest fell from the 1920s until the mid-1940s, rose briefly in the post-war decade, and then declined until the early-1980s. During the...

Average gender pay gaps have absorbed the interest of economists for many years. More recently studies have begun to explore the degree to which observed gender wage gaps might differ across the wages distribution. The stylised facts from these studies, summarised in the first part of the paper,...

Pooling microdata from five Australian censuses, I explore the relationship between child gender and divorce. By contrast with the United States, I find no evidence that the gender of the first child has a significant impact on the decision to marry or divorce. However, among two-child families,...

The “new discrimination” refers to the use of government policy to increase the effective gender wage gap, measured in terms of the second earner’s net of tax income gain from working in the market place rather than at home. This paper presents an analysis of the tax treatment of family...