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,...

How much do returns to education differ across different natural experiment methods? To test this, we estimate the rate of return to schooling in Australia using two different instruments for schooling: month of birth and changes in compulsory schooling laws. With annual pre-tax income as our...

Outside the United States (U.S.), very little is known about long-run trends in school productivity. We present new evidence using two data series from Australia, where comparable tests are available back to the 1960s. For young teenagers (aged 13-14), we find a small but statistically...

This paper exploits a policy-induced natural experiment that occurred in South Australia in the mid-1980s to generate a 'causal' estimate of the effect of schooling on the literacy and numeracy performance of school students in their middle years of secondary school (in Year 9 for most...

"The public vocational education and training (VET) system is one of the few areas in Australia's tertiary education system where students are required to pay upfront fees without access to loan assistance. These arrangements may lead to sub-optimal educational outcomes to the extent that...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate a 'couples-based' policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families with dependent children in which no adult was in paid employment. Selected women on family benefits (who were partnered with men receiving unemployment benefits)...

We re-analyse data used by Le and Miller (2005), where it is found that students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds have lower university participation rates than those from higher SES backgrounds. We utilise the concept of eligibility to attend university - here defined by both...

We analyse data in which individuals from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds have lower university participation rates than those from higher SES backgrounds. Our focus is on the role played by credit constraints in explaining these different participation rates. We propose a...