We systematically compare differences in recent Australian income inequality estimates derived from tax records and survey data. We use customised tax tables provided by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to more precisely measure Australian top incomes as conceptualised in the international...

Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez (2011) survey an important new literature using income taxbased data to measure the share of income held by top income groups. But changes in tax legislation that expand the tax base to include income sources (e.g. capital gains, dividends, etc.) disproportionately...

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% of job...

This paper uses longitudinal survey data to test the degree to which measures of job insecurity are correlated with changes in labour market status. Three major findings are reported. First, the perceived probability of job loss is only weakly related to both exogenous job separations and...

Using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children (LSAC), this is the first analysis for Australia to evaluate the impact of attendance at pre-school programs on matched Year 3 nation-wide NAPLAN test outcomes in the domains of Numeracy, Reading, Spelling, Writing and Grammar. We...

This paper estimates the effect of income uncertainty on assets held in accounts and cash, and finds substantial empirical evidence for precautionary savings. Using household-level panel data, it explicitly distinguishes between ‘real' income uncertainty the household is actually exposed to,...

People with disability face considerable difficulty participating fully in work and the wider community, due in part to poor schooling outcomes. To enable students with disability to meet their potential, the governments provide extra funding to schools to help them meet their special learning...

The Australian Government launched the My School website in 2010 to provide standardised information about the quality of schools to the Australian public. This paper combines data from this website with home sales data for the state of Victoria to estimate the effect of the publication of...

The effects of unemployment on the subjective wellbeing (SWB) of the unemployed on the unemployed are well documented. Using data from the German SOEP for 17-25 year olds living with their parents, this paper examines the additional indirect effects of parents’ unemployment on their...

Unconditional quantile regressions, as introduced by Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009), are a special case of Recentered Influence Functions (RIF) Regressions that can be used to relate how small changes in the distributions of explanatory variables affect an unconditional statistic of interest....