With many countries considering the adoption of a system of earned income tax credits, it is useful to analyze how different types of credits affect labor supply and earnings. This paper focuses on a 1999 reform to the UK tax credit system, which increased the value of the credit and reduced the...

Like their counterparts elsewhere, more young Australians than ever are delaying the move to establish residential independence from their parents. This paper reviews the developing economics literature surrounding young people’s decisions to continue living in their parents’ homes in order...

This paper considers more major structural reforms which could address such problems in a systematic manner, and allow the implementation of a designed set of effective tax rates (ETRs) for social security clients and taxpayers.

This paper considers educational investment, wages and hours of market work in an imperfectly competitive labour market with heterogeneous workers and home production. It investigates the degree to which there might be both underemployment in the labour market and underinvestment in education. A...

We examine the case for maintaining welfare and income redistribution programs even when their adverse general equilibrium effects reduce total earnings of poor households. Using a Cournot model of intra-household decision-making, we show that even if welfare cutbacks generate large increases in...

The current system for the imposition and collection of fines in Australia is significantly flawed. Fines are often inappropriately imposed or not imposed, inequitable, have high default rates and are expensive to enforce. This paper suggests an alternative scheme for the enforcement and...

The paper discusses a number of trends in the use of macro-economic models for acquiring information about the macro-economy. It is argued that a fundamental distinction should be drawn between models that are constructed to summarise the data and those which are used to interpret the data. By...

Using data from the 2001-2005 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, and taking account of existing estimates of ability bias and social returns to schooling, I estimate the economic return to various levels of education. Raising high school attainment appears to...