While more mothers have been participating in the paid workforce over recent years, the employment rate of lone mothers remains lower than that of couple mothers. This paper provides new insights into these different rates of employment, by examining whether the lower employment rate of lone...

This paper investigates a tentative finding in recent literature that the age dispersion of workers matters for average firm productivity. The reason is not related to differences in the workers’ age specific productivity levels. Rather it is that workers of different ages are complementary in...

This research examines the effect of disability status on the labour market earnings of males and females in Australia. The results indicate that disabilities have a large impact on labour earnings, however, this impact is not uniform across disabilities or between males and females for the same...

We explore the determinants of the relative probabilities of labour force participation for British and Spanish married (or cohabiting) mothers. We further decompose these probabilities and find a substantial cross-national gap in participation rates that can be predominantly explained by higher...

This paper uses a microsimulation model that permits interactions between taxes,government benefits and housing assistance parameters and data from various releases of the Survey of Income and Housing Costs to illustrate how the distribution of effective marginal tax rates has varied between the...

In 2001 the first wave of the HILDA Survey, Australia’s first ever large-scale household panel survey, was conducted. This article presents an introduction to this survey. It provides a summary of the design and the process by which the sample was selected, the type of information being...

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...

Statutory minimum wages increased substantially in New Zealand between 2000 and 2008. Where less than three per cent of workers were being paid the minimum wage in the late 1990s, this figure increased to more than ten per cent of workers by 2008. However, it is not obvious how this rise in the...

With governments worldwide attempting to increase the labour force participation of older workers in the context of ageing populations, both older workers marginally attached to the labour force (discouraged workers), and those whose labour force participation is affected by cyclical...

Supporting those mature-age workers who wish to continue working is a key policy challenge arising from the Intergenerational Report 2010. As previous research indicates, there are many factors that influence labour market engagement of those approaching retirement. This paper examines those...