In October 1998, I was one of five economists who wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, suggesting a suite of policies that could help to substantially reduce the unemployment rate to around 5 per cent. The other four were John Freebairn, Ross Garnaut, Michael Keating and Chris Richardson. This...

Whilst employment levels in Australia are healthy when compared to those twenty years ago, the available work has become increasingly polarised into either all-work or no-work households. This paper measures the extent of polarisation that has taken place in Australia since 1982 with a measure...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness offer conflicting signals about labour market performance. This paper shows that while individual based measures of joblessness have remained fairly stable over the last 10 years or so and have fallen after highs in the early...

Whilst employment levels in Australia are healthy when compared to those twenty years ago, the available work has become increasingly polarised into either all-work or no-work households. This paper measures the extent of polarisation that has taken place in Australia between 1982 and 1997/98...

This paper summarises a large project involving many studies to evaluate the effects on employment and unemployment in Australia of macroeconomic, wage restraint, taxation and social security systems, and of education and training policies. One set of studies finds that the NAIRU is an uncertain...

The Australian government implemented a series of new private health insurance policies between 1997 and 2000. As a result, the proportion of the population with private health insurance coverage increased by more than 35%. However, this paper finds significant evidence that the policy reform...

In this article it is shown that individual-based measures of joblessness and household measures of joblessness have diverged over the last twenty years with joblessness becoming increasingly concentrated in certain households