The Australian Taxation Office release of annual longitudinally linked individual tax and superannuation records, known as the ATO Longitudinal Information Files (ALife), opens-up opportunities for new research. In this study, we provide an overview of ALife, focusing on its use for retirement...

Many countries impose job search requirements on unemployment benefit recipients. Existing studies have evaluated only incremental changes to requirements. Australian reforms in 1995 saw groups of welfare recipients newly subjected to job search requirements, allowing us to produce the first...

Governments are responding to fiscal pressures associated with aging populations by increasing the eligibility age for publicly-funded retirement benefits. However, recent studies show large resulting increases in the receipt of disability and unemployment benefits, which raises concern that...

Many governments offer tax concessions for retirement contributions. In this paper, we show that income responses are crucial for understanding their effectiveness in raising retirement savings and alleviating the fiscal pressures of population aging. Using tax register data, we study large...

As a form of human capital health like education determines individuals' productivity and thus wage rates. While there are numerous overseas studies that examine the effect of health on wages, research on this issue using Australian data is scarce. This paper uses the Household, Income and...

Previous research on union wage effects in Australia has focused on the central parts of the conditional wage distribution. This study uses quantile regression models to examine whether the union wage effect varies across the (conditional) wage distribution. The data draw upon the first four...

A concern when estimating the effect of health on labour supply is that health might be endogenous, and in particular that people might use poor health to justify non-participation. This would result in the effect of health being overestimated if health were treated as exogenous. The paper...

This article introduces four metrics quantifying the adequacy of retirement savings taking into account all major sources of retirement income. The metrics are applied to a representative sample of the Australian population aged 40 and above. Employers in Australia currently make compulsory...

There are occasions when a very short assessment of mental health or distress is needed. Theweekly assessment of distress in Australia during the COVID-19 crisis using the nationallyrepresentative Taking the Pulse of the Nation (TTPN) Survey is one example. This paperassesses the psychometric...

Published ABS data from the Survey of Income and Housing (SIH) show a substantial increase in income inequality between 2001 and 2010. However, almost all of the increase occurred over a period when changes in survey methodology and income concept were occurring. I document these changes,...