<Para ID="Par1">Immigrants experience substantial disadvantages in employment in the host country. “Ethnic capital” (e.g. the ethnic network) is argued to provide a niche for immigrants. Previous international studies adopt either ethnic concentration or language as proxy for immigrants’ network in host...</para>

With significant increases in the demand for new skills and participation in higher education in New Zealand since the 1980s, and the introduction of economic reforms toward market liberalisation since the mid 1980s, an examination of income returns to investments in higher education has been of...

New Zealand panel data, which provide extensive information on the benefit histories of parents and their children, are used to estimate an intergenerational correlation coefficient in social welfare dependency. Recent estimation techniques for addressing issues of measurement error are applied...

How do private returns to tertiary education in New Zealand compare internationally? According to the latest OECD measures, the private rate of return for New Zealand is 8.9%, compared to an OECD average of 12.4%, placing New Zealand toward the bottom of the OECD ranking. The aim of this study...

The recent international literature on immigration wage effects has shown contrasting results. Past studies have focussed on the effect of low skilled immigrants on native-born workers in the US, and have yielded results ranging from no impact to negative impacts. This paper, by contrast,...

This paper describes microsimulation modelling in non-technical terms; and it explains what can be achieved with microsimulation modelling in general, and the Melbourne Institute Tax and Transfer Simulator (MITTS) in particular. The focus is on behavioural microsimulation modelling, which takes...

This paper addresses the need for a measure of the uncertainty that is associated with the results calculated through tax policy behavioural microsimulation modelling. Deriving the analytical measure would be extremely complicated, therefore, a simulated approach is proposed which generates a...

This paper investigates whether job offers arrive more frequently for those in employment than for those in unemployment. To this end, we take advantage of a unique Australian data set which contains information on both accepted and rejected job offers. Our estimation strategy takes account of...

Providing mothers with access to paid parental leave may be an important public policy to improve child and maternal health. Using extensive information from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Children (LSAC), we contribute to the literature by estimating the effect of paid parental leave...

This paper investigates the importance of parents reading to their young children. Using Australian data we find that parental reading to children at age 4 to 5 has positive and significant effects on reading skills and cognitive skills of these children at least up to age 10 or 11. Our findings...