Previous research into the correlates and determinants of non-response in longitudinal surveys has focused exclusively on why it is that respondents at one survey wave choose not to participate at future waves. This is very understandable if non-response is always an absorbing state, but in many...

The accepted view among psychologists and economists alike is that household income has statistically significant but only small effects on measures of subjective well-being. Income, however, is clearly an imperfect measure of the economic circumstances of households. Using data drawn from the...

The accepted view among psychologists and economists alike is that economic well-being has a statistically significant but only weak effect on happiness/subjective well-being (SWB). This view is based almost entirely on weak relationships with household income. The paper uses household economic...

This paper uses longitudinal data from Australia to examine the extent to which overskilling - the extent to which work-related skills and abilities are utilized in current employment - is a transitory phenomenon. The results suggest that while overskilled workers are much more likely to want to...

We introduce the ideas of ?drop ceilings?, that full-time employees who switch to reduced hours thereafter face an hours ceiling such that a return to full-time employment is difficult, and of ?trap-door floors?, that full-time employees may be denied the opportunity to reduce their hours and...

We develop a typology for understanding couple households where the female is the major earner – what we term female breadwinner households – and test it using data from the first two waves of the HILDA Survey. We distinguish temporary from persistent female breadwinner households and...

We consider desires for flexibility in weekly hours by analyzing changes in work hours preferences using four years of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. We control for work hours preferences in previous years and test for effects on desired labor...

Empirical studies have consistently reported that rates of involuntary job separation, or dismissal, are significantly lower among female employees than among males. Only rarely, however, have the reasons for this differential been the subject of detailed investigation. In this paper, household...

This paper uses longitudinal survey data to test the degree to which measures of job insecurity are correlated with changes in labour market status. Three major findings are reported. First, the perceived probability of job loss is only weakly related to both exogenous job separations and...