We use Centrelink payment records on Disability Support Pension (DSP) recipients over the period 1995 to 2002 to investigate individual transitions off the payment. Our analysis involves two distinct, but complementary, components. The first component, which can be represented as an ‘entry...

Previous research on union wage effects in Australia has focused on the central parts of the conditional wage distribution. This study uses quantile regression models to examine whether the union wage effect varies across the (conditional) wage distribution. The data draw upon the first four...

This paper investigates the use of sample reweighting in a behavioural tax microsimulation model, to examine the implications for government taxes and expenditure of population ageing in Australia. First, a calibration approach to sample reweighting is described, producing new weights which...

A concern when estimating the effect of health on labour supply is that health might be endogenous, and in particular that people might use poor health to justify non-participation. This would result in the effect of health being overestimated if health were treated as exogenous. The paper...

The trend of declining labour force participation by older working-age men, combined with an ageing population, has led many industrialised nations to develop policies encouraging older male workers to remain in the labour force. A better understanding of how an individual’s health influences...

The paper examines the factors that determine the duration on the Disability Support Pension (DSP) program using administrative data. We estimate two models based on two competing assumptions: the first model takes the standard assumption in duration models that all recipients will eventually...

By estimating a simultaneous equation model on panel data, this study examines whether self-reported disability status is endogenous to labour force status. While for males the exogeneity of disability status cannot be rejected, it is rejected for females. However, for both males and females the...

Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, our research indicates that unobserved heterogeneity substantially biases cross-sectional estimates of union wage effects upward for both males and females. Estimates of the union wage premium for male workers...

This paper examines the effect of health on labour force participation using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The potential endogeneity of health, especially self-assessed health, in the labour force participation equation is addressed by estimating the...

From the administrative data of the Australian Department of Family and Community Services it is found that a large proportion of Disability Support Pension (DSP) recipients transferred from unemployment benefits. Among those who transferred to DSP from unemployment benefits, a large proportion...