Has income tax become voluntary in Australia? It appears that for some, nil or very low tax bills are a very real prospect. Those with flexibility over how they earn income can use a range of legal means of ‘tax arbitrage' to pay a lower marginal tax rate. Those highly motivated to achieve the...

We examine the consumer price inflation experiences of Australian households across the income distribution using Australian Bureau of Statistics data and prices and methodology from the national consumer price index. Across the period 2011 – 2018, we find that the lowest income households...

Welfare reform in Australia centres on the concept of 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 randomized trial was conducted by the Department of Family...

We use well-being data from the Gallup Daily Poll and a measure of racial animus derived from Google search data to explain why racial identification became politically salient in the 2016 Presidential Election. We find that the oft-observed positive relationship between racial animus and...

We examine whether there is any causal effect of article length on citation. Focusing on articles published between 2010 and 2014 in the top five journals in economics and their citation count in Google Scholar, we find that a one per cent increase in page length generates a 0.55 per cent...