It is commonplace in Australian policy debate for groups presumed to be adversely affected by proposed policies to provide estimates of the undesirable consequences of change. A highly public example of the above is the claim by the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), based on work done in 2009...

Debate over regulation of dismissals has been intense in recent years, and renewed in the lead-up to the 2012 review of the operation of the Fair Work Act. This paper reviews the economically relevant aspects of the legislative changes from the Workplace Relations Act which operated from...

We use data from a nationally representative Australian household panel survey to examine the extent and nature of self-reported job discrimination, its correlates, and its associations with various employment outcomes and measures of subjective wellbeing. We find that approximately 8.5 per cent...

From 2006 to 2009, Federal minimum wages in Australia were set by the Australian Fair Pay Commission. This paper uses data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia panel survey to investigate the circumstances of persons who are paid at or near the minimum wage, and thus...

An essential policy issue for the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme is to project the likely future demand for places. This paper revisits previous estimates of such demand with the aim of adjusting these to account for subsequent increase in CDEP employment and to...

This paper aims to compare the labour market effects of two alternative retirement income polices: the superannuation guarantee charge; and the higher income taxes that would be required to fund the greater pension expenditure that would be incurred if the superannuation guarantee charge was...

This paper uses data from the 2003 HILDA Survey to assess the impact of maternity leave on the incidence of pregnancy among Australian women. The empirical analysis accounts for the fact that data on maternity leave is unobserved for non-working women and applies a Heckprobit selection model to...

This paper provides pictures of low pay adult employees in Australia in 2004 drawing on data from the HILDA survey. The low paid are disaggregated into full-time and part-time employees. Estimates from multivariate probit models reveal that low wage employees are more likely to have casual...

In Australia, as in other countries, people who have significant responsibilities for caring for a person with a disability or long-term health problem have lower employment rates than those without caring responsibilities. This paper uses data from the 2006 Families Caring for a Person with a...

Enhancing migration and mobility has been put forward by various commentators as a solution to Indigenous disadvantage in Australia, This paper examined patterns of migration and factors associated with the decision to move and the choice of destination in order to assess the feasibility of this...