The purpose of this paper is to improve our understanding of the relationship between child care price and women's labour supply. We specify and estimate a discrete, structural model of the joint household decision over women’s labour supply and child care demand. Parents care about the...

In this paper, we investigate the response of female lone parents to two reforms to the welfare system in Australia. We look at changes to both hours and participation and focus on the channels of adjustment, in particular the role of job changes for adjustment in hours. We highlight the...

We examine whether subjective responses to survey questions about child care availability, quality, and cost, aggregated at the local geographical level, have any explanatory power in models of workforce participation and labour supply. We find that married women who live in areas with more...

The degree of responsiveness of Australian women’s labour supply to child care cost has been a matter of some debate. There is a view that the level of responsiveness is very low or negligible, running counter to international and anecdotal evidence. In this paper we review the Australian and...

We evaluate price subsidies and tax credits for child care. We focus on partnered women's labor supply, household income and welfare, demand for formal and informal child care and government expenditure. Using Australian data, we estimate a joint, discrete structural model of labor supply and...

This paper summarises new evidence from two Treasury working papers on the responsiveness of female labour supply to child care costs, availability, and quality. In one study, we drew on lessons from the literature and new detailed data to provide new estimates of the labour supply elasticity...

We use unique data in which both partners report about household finances to demonstrate that there is often disagreement about whether the household has experienced financial difficulty in the past year. Four alternative explanations for this disagreement are tested using the data. The results...

We study the work hours of Australian couples, using a neoclassical labour-supply model in which couples choose from a small, realistic set of possible wife-husband working hour combinations We introduce three improvements to this standard model. First, we allow partners' preferences about...

The degree of responsiveness of Australian women's labour supply to child care cost has been a matter of some debate. There is a view that the level of responsiveness is very low or negligible, running counter to international and anecdotal evidence. In this paper we review the Australian and...