Unsustainable growth in program costs and beneficiaries, together with a growing recognition that even people with severe impairments can work, led to fundamental disability policy reforms in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Great Britain. In Australia, rapid growth in disability recipiency led to...

Survey under-coverage of top incomes leads to bias in survey-based estimates of overall income inequality. Using income tax record data in combination with survey data is a potential approach to address the problem; we consider here the UK's pioneering "SPI adjustment" method that implements...

This paper describes the dynamics of smoking behaviour in Australia and investigates what role smoking ban regulation has, if any, on individual level smoking patterns. The main argument to motivate the introduction of tougher smoking bans is the effect of second hand smoke on non-smokers. From...

Estimates of UK income inequality trends differ substantially according to whether estimates are based on household survey data (used for official statistics) or tax return data (used in the top incomes literature). We reconcile differences in variable definitions and combine survey and tax...

The share of women in the top 1% of the UK’s income distribution has been growing over the last two decades (as in several other countries). Our first contribution is to account for this secular change using regressions of the probability of being in the top 1%, fitted separately for men and...

Many countries impose job search requirements as a condition of unemployment benefit receipt, but there is relatively little evidence on the efficacy of these requirements. Australian reforms in 1995 and 2003 saw groups of welfare recipients newly subjected to job search requirements, providing...

The share of women in the top 1% of the UK's income distribution has been growing over the last two decades (as in several other countries). Our first contribution is to account for this secular change using regressions of the probability of being in the top 1%, fitted separately for men and...

Many countries impose job search requirements on unemployment benefit recipients. Existing studies have evaluated only incremental changes to requirements. Australian reforms in 1995 saw groups of welfare recipients newly subjected to job search requirements, allowing us to produce the first...

We use a new Australian longitudinal income tax dataset, Alife, covering 1991–2017, to examine levels and trends in the persistence in top-income group membership, focussing on the top 1%. We summarize persistence in multiple ways, documenting levels and trends in rates of remaining in...

We produce estimates of the full distribution of all national income in Australia for the period 1991 to 2018, by combining household survey with administrative tax microdata and adjusting to match National Accounts aggregates. From these estimates, we are able to rigorously document the shifts...