This study examines how an intention on the part of tourists to purchase items for daily use is determined by their awareness of franchise-branded stores, the image of those brands, and the perceived risk of purchase from non-franchised stores within Taiwan. In that country franchised chains are...

This paper offers insights into the power-knowledge situations within tour guide training in Macao and queries the associated embedded capitalistic domination and utopian pressures. Drawing upon a tour guide trainer’s autoethnography, ethnography within the classroom, life and work history...

How much do returns to education differ across different natural experiment methods? To test this, we estimate the rate of return to schooling in Australia using two different instruments for schooling: month of birth and changes in compulsory schooling laws. With annual pre-tax income as our...

This paper exploits a policy-induced natural experiment that occurred in South Australia in the mid-1980s to generate a 'causal' estimate of the effect of schooling on the literacy and numeracy performance of school students in their middle years of secondary school (in Year 9 for most...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate a “couples-based” policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families without work. In 2000 and 2001, the Australian Government piloted a new counseling initiative targeted towards couple-headed families with dependent children in...

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

We re-analyse data used by Le and Miller (2005), where it is found that students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds have lower university participation rates than those from higher SES backgrounds. We utilise the concept of eligibility to attend university - here defined by both...

We analyse data in which individuals from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds have lower university participation rates than those from higher SES backgrounds. Our focus is on the role played by credit constraints in explaining these different participation rates. We propose a...

Australian school student achievement in reading and mathematical literacy has fallen in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) collection since 2000. This study finds that these declines were widespread in the student population, affecting both males and females. However, 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...