Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment and using administrative data, we examine the effects of the return-to-work policies' clawback regime in Disability Insurance (DI) programs on beneficiaries' labor supply decisions, allowing them to collect reduced DI payments while working. We compare two...

How important are adjustment costs for individuals when they face a change in work incentives induced by a policy change? I provide the first estimate of heterogeneous adjustment costs by exploiting a policy change that substantially increased work incentives. The policy change increased the...

Using data for the 2005-2017 period, we consider the effects of resource rents on the sub-components of Freedom House's measures of Political Rights and Civil Liberties. Higher resource rents lead to a deterioration in Political Pluralism and Participation, but do not affect other...

This paper explores risk aversion among Australian households using panel data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. Using households' share of risky assets, we test whether relative risk aversion is constant in wealth. After accounting for measurement error,...

Recent research has highlighted a negative impact of inequality on economic growth. We re-evaluate this hypothesis focusing on both inequality and poverty and their interaction. We replicate previous results showing that inequality has a negative impact on growth. However, we show that when we...

In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between economic openness and nationalism. We replicate and extend the cross-country analysis of Lan and Li (2015) using additional measures of nationalism and additional years of data from the World Values Survey. We fail to find the negative...

In this paper, we investigate the response of female lone parents to two reforms to the welfare system in Australia. We look at changes to both hours and participation and focus on the channels of adjustment, in particular the role of job changes for adjustment in hours. We highlight the...

Welfare reform in Australia centres on the concept of both economic and social participation. The policy concern is that people who fail to participate in economic and social life may become entrenched in disadvantage. In 2000 - 2001, a randomized trial was conducted by the Department of Family...

We use unique data in which both partners report about household finances to demonstrate that there is often disagreement about whether the household has experienced financial difficulty in the past year. Four alternative explanations for this disagreement are tested using the data. The results...