At any given time, individuals may be subject to health shocks whose impact on work capacity can vary in magnitude. Therefore the variation in severity levels can explain changes in labour force decisions that can not be picked up by the general disability status alone. This paper analyses the...

This paper examines the impact of self-reported work-limitation on the employment of the Australian working age population. Five consecutive waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey are used to investigate this relationship. A two-equation dynamic panel data...

The central research question addressed in this paper is how receipt of income support payments affects the well-being of youths. Using 1997-2004 panel data from a nationally representative survey of Australian youths, we attempt to estimate the size of the welfare stigma faced by Australian...

The aim of this paper is to estimate in a multivariate context the factors associated with well-being and ill-being without making the assumptions that they are opposite ends of the same continuum, and that the factors uniformly affect both well-being and ill-being. Using the first five waves of...

In Australia, labour force participation among older people, particularly men over the age of 55, has been declining over the last 30 years. Previous research has found that in many OECD countries, the retirement income system actually provides incentives for older workers to retire early rather...

We use Centrelink payment records on Disability Support Pension (DSP) recipients over the period 1995 to 2002 to investigate individual transitions off the payment. Our analysis involves two distinct, but complementary, components. The first component, which can be represented as an ‘entry...

Previous research on union wage effects in Australia has focused on the central parts of the conditional wage distribution. This study uses quantile regression models to examine whether the union wage effect varies across the (conditional) wage distribution. The data draw upon the first four...

A concern when estimating the effect of health on labour supply is that health might be endogenous, and in particular that people might use poor health to justify non-participation. This would result in the effect of health being overestimated if health were treated as exogenous. The paper...

The trend of declining labour force participation by older working-age men, combined with an ageing population, has led many industrialised nations to develop policies encouraging older male workers to remain in the labour force. A better understanding of how an individual’s health influences...

The paper examines the factors that determine the duration on the Disability Support Pension (DSP) program using administrative data. We estimate two models based on two competing assumptions: the first model takes the standard assumption in duration models that all recipients will eventually...