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...

Labour market programs aim to enhance both total employment and equality of job opportunities. While the employment effects have been studied extensively in Australia and overseas, the effects on equality has scarcely received any attention. The existing literature implies that any assistance to...

This paper provides a literature review on economics of the family. In particular, where decisions of families related to marriage, fertility, labour supply and home production are concerned. First an overview of the theory on these issues is given, followed by a selection of empirical studies....

In this paper we explore the meaning and relevance of community and social capital, working mainly in economics though drawing on other disciplines. Economic studies of community have focussed in one of two main areas, neighbourhood studies and regional economics. We discuss the contributions of...

This study estimates a cost function for higher education in Australian universities using pooled series of cross-sectional data. The study enabled the quantification of the cost differences between levels of studies and subject areas. The cost function is useful in an number of ways. It can be...

Concerns have been expressed about the reliability of income and expenditure data from Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys for those on low incomes. This paper analyses the factors behind the apparently low incomes recorded by many Australian households, in particular, in major ABS data...

Previous studies find a positive relationship between juvenile and adult criminal involvement. Using data on males from the Delinquency in a Birth Cohort II study, we investigate whether this correlation is due to unobserved characteristics that increase the probability of both juvenile and...