This paper investigates the importance of parents reading to their young children. Using Australian data we find that parental reading to children at age 4 to 5 has positive and significant effects on reading skills and cognitive skills of these children at least up to age 10 or 11. Our findings...

Despite several policy efforts to promote economic participation by Indigenous Australians, they continue to have low participation rates compared to non-Indigenous Australians. This study decomposes the gap in labour market attachment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in...

Few papers examine the pecuniary and non-pecuniary determinants of doctors’ labour supply despite substantial predicted shortages in many OECD countries. We contribute to the literature by applying both a structural discrete choice and a reduced-form approach. Using detailed survey data for...

Providing mothers with access to paid parental leave may be an important public policy to improve child and maternal health. Using extensive information from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Children (LSAC), we contribute to the literature by estimating the effect of paid parental leave...

This paper focuses on the correlation of labour market outcomes of parents and children and investigates whether education is an important factor in this correlation, allowing for its potential endogeneity. Based on the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) data, the...

Many countries face a continuing shortage in nurses' labour supply. Previous research suggests that nurses respond only weakly to changes in wages. However, the decision to exit or enter the nursing profession has not been taken into account in previous studies, although the occupational choice...

This paper investigates the persistence over time of living in a jobless household, aiming to disentangle the roles of state dependence and unobserved heterogeneity. In addition, the potential heterogeneity of state dependence is examined through estimation of interaction terms with the lagged...

This paper investigates how wage growth varies among Australian employees with different individual characteristics and job characteristics, and how the role of these characteristics has changed over the 2001-2018 period. The results show that after increasing between 2002 and 2007, wage growth...

This paper investigates patterns of childcare use and their influence on the cognitive development of Indigenous children. The influence of childcare on the cognitive outcomes of Indigenous children is less well understood than for non-Indigenous children due to a lack of appropriate data. This...

Social bonds and supportive relationships (social support) are widely recognised as being indispensable to healthy psychological functioning and wellbeing. Applying a multilevel approach to the 2001-2016 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) data, we assess the impact of...