This paper begins by considering the Australian evidence on intergenerational social and economic mobility in the context of the international literature. Recent evidence from the Youth in Focus project is used to highlight the effects of growing up in socio-economic disadvantage on a range of...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate a 'couples-based' policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families with dependent children in which no adult was in paid employment. Selected women on family benefits (who were partnered with men receiving unemployment benefits)...

A novel theoretical approach is developed to illustrate the consequences of immigration for the probability that unemployed residents gain a job. Through the use of the vacancies to unemployment ratio it is shown that immigration in theory can either increase or decrease unemployed residents'...

This article uses longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (or HILDA) Survey to examine the extent to which the relatively high rates of transition from low-paid employment into unemployment are the result of disadvantageous personal characteristics or are...

The accepted view among psychologists and, increasingly, economists is that household income has statistically significant but only small effects on measures of subjective well-being. Income, however, is clearly an imperfect measure of the economic circumstances of households. Using data drawn...

There appears to be widespread consensus, at least in industry and government, that enterprise bargaining has been beneficial for productivity. Many academics, however, have argued that the link between bargaining structure and workplace productivity is a contentious one, and that research has...

This article uses workplace level data from the recent Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey to test a simple demand and supply model explaining the level of union membership within Australia. The findings suggest that previous research using individual-level data has understated the...

Previous research on union wage effects has underestimated the potential for unions to raise member wages since the data used do not enable differences across bargaining units to be properly accounted for. This study addresses this deficiency by utilizing matched employer-employee data that...

The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey is Australia's first nationally representative household panel survey. This article reviews the achievements of the HILDA Survey since its inception in 2001. It briefly describes the design of the survey and the data...