Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez (2011) survey an important new literature using income taxbased data to measure the share of income held by top income groups. But changes in tax legislation that expand the tax base to include income sources (e.g. capital gains, dividends, etc.) disproportionately...

Survey under-coverage of top incomes leads to bias in survey-based estimates of overall income inequality. Using income tax record data in combination with survey data is a potential approach to address the problem; we consider here the UK's pioneering ‘SPI adjustment' method that implements...

We systematically compare differences in recent Australian income inequality estimates derived from tax records and survey data. We use customised tax tables provided by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to more precisely measure Australian top incomes as conceptualised in the international...

The share of women in the top 1% of the UK's income distribution has been growing over the last two decades (as in several other countries). Our first contribution is to account for this secular change using regressions of the probability of being in the top 1%, fitted separately for men and...

Estimates of UK income inequality trends differ substantially according to whether estimates are based on household survey data (used for official statistics) or tax return data (used in the top incomes literature). We reconcile differences in variable definitions and combine survey and tax...

This paper presents estimates of endogenous peer effects in pupils’ school achievement using data on national test scores, across multiple subjects and cohorts, for the population of primary school pupils in Years 3 and 5 (aged 7/8 and 9/10 years) in the Australian state of Victoria....

This paper examines peer effects in adolescent cannabis use from several different reference groups, exploiting survey data that have many desirable properties and have not previously been used for this purpose. Treating the school grade as the reference group, and using both neighbourhood fixed...

Outside of apprenticeships, allocations of public funds across vocational education and training (VET) courses are often made on the basis of government forecasts, with limited competition between (mostly public) colleges. This centralised model is often blamed for stifling responsiveness to...

It is widely assumed that contingent forms of employment, such as fixed-term contracts, labour-hire and casual employment, are associated with low quality jobs. This hypothesis is tested using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, a nationally...

This paper examines the impacts of recent Australian welfare to work reforms for low income parents of school-aged children who had been in receipt of Parenting Payment for at least one year. Specifically, the reforms introduced a requirement to engage in at least 15 hours of work-related...