Australia’s retirement income system has several distinctive features – most notably a policy of government mandated private saving and a means-tested Age Pension – which have gained increasing international attention. This paper provides an overview of the institutional features of the...

This paper investigates the quantitative effects of employee turnover on firms’ productivity. The Australian Business Longitudinal Survey 1995-98, a unique survey providing firm level data on both production and employee turnover, is used as the data source. Theoretical studies have advocated...

This paper investigates the determinants of firm-level labour productivity in the manufacturing sector using GAPS data. These data are from a stratified survey, where the strata are based on industry and firm size. The paper focuses on whether weights should be applied in the regression...

This study examines the impact of the Jobseeker Diary program (JSD), a large-scale intervention designed to increase job search effort of unemployed persons in Australia. Its scale, and focus on work-search verification, make the JSD program relatively unique in the international context....

There appears to be widespread consensus, at least in industry and in government, that enterprise bargaining has been beneficial for productivity. Many academics however, have argued that the link between bargaining structure and workplace productivity is a contentious one, and that research has...

Working hours in Australia are quite widely distributed around the population mean. That is, there are relatively many people working both relatively short hours and relatively long hours each week. From a welfare perspective, however, it is not the actual number of hours worked that is of...

The 1990s has seen bargaining, and more specifically, enterprising bargaining supplant arbitration as the dominant industrial relations paradigm. In large part, this change reflects widespread belief that enterprise bargaining would stimulate greater levels of productivity. Evidence in support...

Welfare dependence or reliance is widely regarded to have adverse consequences for both the community and welfare recipients, yet there have been few studies of the extent and nature of welfare reliance. Indeed, the concept of welfare reliance does not seem to be well defined. In the present...

This paper investigates the role of industry-specific human capital (ISHC) in determining industry wage structure. The model presented in this paper distinguishes between knowledge labour and physical labour. Knowledge labour is physical labour embodied with ISHC. It is postulated that more...

Data from a representative survey of adult Australians are analysed for usual and preferred working time across family types. We discover a time divide regardless of gender and family type: many short hours individuals desire longer hours of employment, while many long hours individuals prefer...