How do parents, teachers, taxpayers and school administrators know if their children attend a good school? Parents, in particular, deserve more information than they can glean from parent-teacher nights or award-filled graduation ceremonies. More meaningful information would allow them to fairly...

The study identifies which Alberta elementary schools are worthy of emulation, as well as those where large improvements are possible, by removing the influence of local socio-economic factors on a school's performance.

In health economics and health care planning, the observation that age cohorts are generally positively correlated with per capita health expenditures is often cited as evidence that population ageing is the main driver of health care costs. Several recent studies, however, challenge this view....

Did inflation targets reduce the level of expected inflation in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom? In this note, predictions of forecasts by professional forecasters are constructed for five consecutive 12-month periods after the announcement of targets. These...

This paper examines inequality and mobility using measures of income and consumption. Consumption is claimed to be a better measure of permanent income and thus well-being, but most studies of inequality and mobility using U.S. data use income.This paper uses cohort data from the Consumer...

This paper provides a literature review on economics of the family. In particular, where decisions of families related to marriage, fertility, labour supply and home production are concerned. First an overview of the theory on these issues is given, followed by a selection of empirical studies....

In this paper we explore the meaning and relevance of community and social capital, working mainly in economics though drawing on other disciplines. Economic studies of community have focussed in one of two main areas, neighbourhood studies and regional economics. We discuss the contributions of...

This study estimates a cost function for higher education in Australian universities using pooled series of cross-sectional data. The study enabled the quantification of the cost differences between levels of studies and subject areas. The cost function is useful in an number of ways. It can be...

Concerns have been expressed about the reliability of income and expenditure data from Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys for those on low incomes. This paper analyses the factors behind the apparently low incomes recorded by many Australian households, in particular, in major ABS data...