Welfare reform in Australia centres on both economic and social participation. The policy concern is that people who fail to participate in economic and social life may become entrenched in disadvantage. In 2000-2001, a randomised trial was conducted by the Department of Family and Community...

We use HILDA data to examine the retirement plans of middle-aged Australians. We find that approximately two-thirds of men and more than half of women report a numeric expected retirement age which we refer to as having a standard retirement plan. Still, one in five individuals seem to have...

This paper analyses the net worth and asset portfolios of native- and foreign-born Australian families. Specifically, we estimate a system of asset equations with an adding-up constraint imposed to control for diversity in household wealth. We find that the wealth of mixed and native-born...

There has recently been a rapid expansion of interest in the econometrics of program evaluation, both within Australia and around the world. We provide a review of the key issues and recent developments in this field. A central feature of recent developments is the attempt to allow for program...

We study work hours of Australian couples using a structural labour-supply model. We introduce model improvements which allow error in wage estimation and unobserved influences on partners' non-market time to be correlated with one another and with own wage. This more realistic model produces...

We use the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia data from 2001 to 2006 to analyse the source of the gender wage gap across public- and private-sector wage distributions in Australia. We are particularly interested in the role of gender segregation within sector-specific occupations...