Whilst employment levels in Australia are healthy when compared to those twenty years ago, the available work has become increasingly polarised into either all-work or no-work households. This paper measures the extent of polarisation that has taken place in Australia since 1982 with a measure...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness offer conflicting signals about labour market performance. This paper shows that while individual based measures of joblessness have remained fairly stable over the last 10 years or so and have fallen after highs in the early...

The authors find evidence from Australian time-series data supporting two hypotheses about the determination of labor absence. First, labor absence modeled in a utility-maximizing framework that stresses the opportunity cost of labor absence receives considerable support from the data. Variables...