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 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...

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...

This study uses longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to study the long-run effects of completing vocational education and training (VET) on a set of labour market outcomes (employment, wages, earnings, hours and occupational status). It...

While is it widely accepted that adults with poor reading skills have inferior labour market outcomes, little is known about whether low reading proficiency in school is a precursor to inferior labour market outcomes in adulthood. We fill this gap in the literature using education and labour...

Education and training among the working-age population has become an increasingly important policy issue as working lives have lengthened and the pace of technological change has quickened. This paper describes the effects of a reform that replaced a supply-driven model, in which government...

Outside of apprenticeships, allocations of public funds across vocational education and training (VET) courses are often made on the basis of government forecasts, with limited competition between (mostly public) colleges. This centralised model is often blamed for stifling responsiveness 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...

In OECD countries, ‘real world’ upper-secondary vocational education and training (VET) programs are used to engage less academically oriented youth in learning, while helping to prepare them for post-school work and/or further training. In general terms, VET programs with high employer...

Education is often claimed to reduce social exclusion and crime, yet there is little empirical evidence beyond that for increased schooling. In this study, we estimate the crime-reducing effects of participating in post-secondary vocational education and training (VET) between ages 16 and 44,...