While many firms compete through the development of new technologies and products, it is well known that new-to-the-world innovation is inherently risky and therefore may increase the probability of firm death. However, many existing studies consistently find a negative association between...

This paper compares five alternative policy options with the January 2006 tax and social security system. Each option is designed to cost a similar amount of 5 billion dollars to the government at the current level of labour supply. The five options are: reducing the lowest income tax rate,...

A distinctive feature of the Australian labour market is a high incidence of casual employment. Almost 27 percent of Australian employees in 2006 were classified as employed on a casual basis, an alarmingly high proportion given the strong claims often made about the harmful effects that casual...

This paper extends the 'top-down' framework, introduced by Robilliard et al. (2001), to link a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to a microsimulation model. The proposed approach allows the linking of a microsimulation model to a dynamic, and not simply a static, CGE model by enabling...

This paper 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...

High neo-natal mortality is one of the most salient ‘facts’ about firm performance in the industrial organization literature. We model firm survival and examine the relative influence of firm, industry and macroeconomic factors on survival for new vis-à-vis incumbent firms. In particular,...

This paper describes the dynamics of smoking behaviour in Australia and investigates what impact smoking ban regulations have, if any, on individual smoking patterns. Such legislation receives a lot of press attention when announced and introduced, but its effect on individuals’ smoking...

Relatively low rates of school completion among students from low socio-economic (SES) backgrounds is a key transmission mechanism for the persistence of intergenerational inequality. Using a rich dataset that links data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) with data from...

In December 2008 and March-April 2009 the Australian Government used fiscal stimulus as a short-run economic stabilization tool for the first time since the 1990s. In May-June 2012, households received lump sum cheques as compensation for the introduction of the Carbon Tax scheduled for 1 July...

We use longitudinal data describing couples in Australia from 2001-12 and Germany from 2002-12 to examine how demographic events affect perceived time and financial stress. Consistent with the view of measures of stress as proxies for the Lagrangean multipliers in models of household production,...