This paper investigates the public-private sector earnings gap for Australian men. It finds that the average earnings of men working in the public sector are larger than the earnings of men employed in the private sector. The difference in the earnings of public and private sector workers is...

Negotiating the Life Course (NLC) is a longitudinal survey that investigates how men and women in Australia negotiate employment, family formation and domestic responsibilities across their lifetimes. The survey collects data on a range of variables: demographic, labour market, income, housing,...

There is growing interest by policy makers in the gap between those who have skills in information technologies and those who do not, due, in part, to the concern that this gap contributes to rising income inequality. In this paper, unit record data are used to examine the factors that determine...

Overeducation is a form of labour underutilization which occurs when the formal education level of a worker exceeds that which is required for the job. In Australia close to 30 per cent of workers are overeducated and are underutilising their skills. Using data from the Negotiating the Life...

This paper presents a simple theoretical model of the Australian Traineeship System and goes on to evaluate the early career outcomes of young persons who take up a traineeship shortly after leaving school. The trainees are compared to other school leavers who do not undertake any further...

Occupational segregation by sex is a persistent phenomenon in contemporary labour markets, and widely assumed to contribute to ongoing gender earnings inequality. In spite of continuing change in the occupational composition of labour markets and legislative efforts to proscribe sex...

The average hours worked by full-time employees in Australia have increased since the late 1970s. This, combined with increases in female labour force participation, has led to concerns about the impact of long work hours on family life. This paper explores the relationship between fathers' work...

This paper analyses high school completion rates, known as ‘apparent retention rates’ in Australia, from 1989 to 2002. Unlike most measures of educational attainment or participation in Australia, the apparent retention rate was lower at the end of the 1990s than it had been in the early...

The Netherlands has recently introduced market forces into the labour market reintegration services sector. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the emerging market-oriented Dutch reintegration services sector meets the conditions, established by Le Grand and Bartlett (1993), for the...

Recent US experience offers lessons about supply-side policies to sustain low unemployment. These include programs to change the skills of the workforce and improve the microeconomic incentives facing workers and employers. Two supply-side policies were greatly expanded after the mid-1980s....