Over the past 40 years, Australia has experienced significant changes to the proportion of the population that is attached to its labour market. From the early 1980s, the aggregate labour force participation rate rose steadily, climbing from around 60 per cent in 1983 to almost 66 per cent in...

A feature of the recent global slowdown in productivity growth is that progress at the technological frontier has remained strong, while the gap between firms at the global frontier and other 'laggards' within an industry has grown. This growing gap reflects the fact that laggard firms now seem...

This paper documents the evolution of firm mark-ups in the Australian economy using a large and representative database derived from administrative tax data. I find that mark-ups have increased by around 5 per cent since the mid-2000s, which is less than previously documented for Australia, and...

International evidence suggests that aggregate productivity growth is driven by the within-industry reallocation of inputs away from less productive firms and towards more productive firms, but little is known about this process in Australia. Accordingly, this paper exploits firm-level data to...

Leading models of on-the-job search suggest that competition among firms for employed workers - reflected in higher job-to-job transition rates - is an important driver of real wages. Intuitively, workers are better placed to move or bargain for increases in wages, hours or promotions when they...

Productivity growth is a key determinant of improvements in living standards in the long run. However, analysis of productivity trends at the aggregate level does not capture the variation of firm and sub-industry productivity performance that underlies industry or aggregate productivity. By...

Wages growth in Australia was lower than expected prior to COVID-19 based on historical determinants. One possible explanation for this is that employment had become more concentrated among a small number of large employers. This reduced outside options for workers and lowered their bargaining...