This paper asks which sub-groups of the population are affected by the payment of a small cash incentive to respond to a telephone survey. We find that an incentive improves response rates primarily amongst those individuals with the longest history of income support receipt. Importantly, these...

Marginal propensity to consume food out of food stamps in the US is higher than that out ofcash income. We explain this in terms of differential impact of cash income and in-kindtransfers on intra-household division of cash. We develop a Cournot model of a multi-personhousehold where food...

Welfare reform in Australia centres on both economic and social participation. The policy concern is that people who fail to participate in economic and social life may become entrenched in disadvantage. In 2000-2001, a randomised trial was conducted by the Department of Family and Community...

We consider a weighted, nonparametric density estimator for stratified samples. We derive the optimal bandwidth using information on within-stratum variances and means. We provide a plug-in bandwidth when all strata are normally distributed. We show that the optimal sampling scheme is stratified...

Not all firms contributed to Australia’s impressive productivity growth in the 1990s. Some performed better than others, and entrants arrived even as incumbents exited. If firms make decisions on input demand and liquidation based on their productivity, the latter known to them...

We use a semi-parametric method to decompose the difference in male and female wage densities into two parts–one explained by characteristics and one which is attributable to differences in returns to characteristics. We learn substantially more about the gender wage gap in France through this...

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...

In this paper, we consider the non-parametric, kernel estimate of the density, f(x), for data drawn from stratified samples. Much of the data used by social scientists is gathered in some type of complex survey violating the usual assumptions of independently and identically distributed data....