Official estimates of school completion rates in Australia increased in the 1980s, peaked in 1992, and fell immediately thereafter before stabilizing. The official estimates were a specific focus of Australian education policy. The decline caused concern at the time. We use data from the...

This paper contains a comparison of high school completion rates across Australian States and Territories from 1989 to 2002. These completion rates, known as 'retention rates', have a number of well-known deficiencies. When we adjust 'official' 2002 retention rates to take account of these...

In Australia in 1989, for the first time in the world, a broadly-based income contingent loan policy for the payment of higher education charges was adopted, when the government introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). This can be seen to be a watershed in terms of the...

We analyze the effect of growing up on welfare on young people's involvement in a variety of social and health risks. Young people in welfare families are much more likely to take both social and health risks. Much of the apparent link between family welfare history and risk taking disappears,...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate a “couples-based” policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families without work. In 2000 and 2001, the Australian Government piloted a new counseling initiative targeted towards couple-headed families with dependent children in...

"International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we...

Self-reported health (SRH) is one of the most frequently employed measures for assessing income-related health inequalities between counties. A previous study has shown that 28% of respondents changed their assessment of their health status when asked a SRH question on two occasions in the same...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate a “couples-based” policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families without work. In 2000 and 2001, the Australian Government piloted a new counseling initiative targeted towards couple-headed families with dependent children in...

This paper reports research on the impact of controls on capital movements on the private capital accounts of countries’ balance of payments using data drawn from 52 countries for the period 1985-92. The results indicate that: (1) capital controls operated by developing countries have not been...

We compare three quasi-experimental approaches to estimating the returns to schooling in Australia: instrumenting schooling using month of birth, instrumenting schooling using changes in compulsory schooling laws, and comparing outcomes for twins. With annual pre-tax income as our measure of...