Outside the United States (U.S.), very little is known about long-run trends in school productivity. We present new evidence using two data series from Australia, where comparable tests are available back to the 1960s. For young teenagers (aged 13-14), we find a small but statistically...

Government subsidies have provided a major source of funds to private schools in Australia for three decades. The increasing level of private school subsidies since the mid-1970s has contributed to a steady increase in the proportion of students enrolled in private schools. This growth in the...

International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we...

This paper describes the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), Australia's income contingent charge mechanism, and analyses its impact on the social composition of university participation. We analyse university participation data from three cohorts of young Australians. The first cohort...

The public vocational education and training (VET) system is now one of the few areas in Australia’s tertiary education system where students are required to pay up-front fees without access to loan assistance. These arrangements may lead to sub-optimal educational outcomes to the extent that...

We compare three quasi-experimental approaches to estimating the returns to schooling in Australia: instrumenting schooling using month of birth, instrumenting schooling using changes in compulsory schooling laws, and comparing outcomes for twins. With annual pre-tax income as our measure of...

We analyze the effect of growing up on welfare on young people’s involvement in a variety of social and health risks. Young people in welfare families are much more likely to take both social and health risks. Much of the apparent link between family welfare history and risk taking disappears,...

In this paper, we provide evidence that reconciles the co-existence of high income mobility among people on low income and patterns of high persistence on income support among people whose income from government payments is low – both phenomena have been founded in different Australian...

This paper contains a comparison of high school completion rates across Australian States and Territories from 1989 to 2002. These completion rates, known as 'retention rates', have a number of well-known deficiencies. When we adjust 'official' 2002 retention rates to take account of these...

In Australia in 1989, for the first time in the world, a broadly-based income contingent loan policy for the payment of higher education charges was adopted, when the government introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). This can be seen to be a watershed in terms of the...