We examine whether subjective responses to survey questions about child care availability, quality, and cost, aggregated at the local geographical level, have any explanatory power in models of workforce participation and labour supply. We find that married women who live in areas with more...

The degree of responsiveness of Australian women’s labour supply to child care cost has been a matter of some debate. There is a view that the level of responsiveness is very low or negligible, running counter to international and anecdotal evidence. In this paper we review the Australian and...

This paper investigates both the added worker effect (the labour supply responses of women to their partners’ job losses) and the discouraged worker effect (workers withdrawing from the labour market because of failed searches) for married women in Australia, with the emphasis on the former....

The main focus of this paper is on the accuracy of predicted wages for the nonemployed. We first examine whether the three groups of non-employed–the unemployed, the marginally attached, and the not in the labour force–should be modelled separately or together. We conclude that these are...

This document estimates a demand equation for petrol in Australia. It explores a methodological improvement to the standard dynamic demand model – a more general model which allows for slowly evolving, unobservable habits. If this habit formation model with unobserved stocks is correct, then...

In recent years, a series of studies have been undertaken in Australia that use static general equilibrium models with a representative household to compare the relative efficiency of different Australian taxes. This paper aims to complement these earlier studies and contribute to a broader...

This paper develops a framework for projecting the GDP growth of Australia’s trading partners from 2012 to 2050. The framework draws heavily on the existing conditional growth literature, including long-standing estimates of key convergence parameters. It adds to the large amount of research...

Treasury’s forecasting framework has evolved over the past 21 years from the outlook for a single financial year to the outlook for the Australian economy 40 years ahead for intergenerational analysis. A constant through this evolution has been the sharp distinction between the methodologies...

Australia’s terms of trade rose significantly over the eight years to 2011 12 following a period of relative constancy over the preceding 40 years. Australian Government fiscal projections from the 2010 11 Budget to the 2013 14 Budget, assumed that beyond the near term forecast period the...

This paper examines the fiscal implications of a significant rise in Australian labour force participation or labour productivity growth over the next forty years, relative to the projections in the Australian Government’s 2002-03 Intergenerational Report (IGR). The alternative, higher, labour...