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...

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...

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...

Despite efforts to engage youth in education, there have been only modest improvements in the rates of school completion across OECD countries since the mid- 1990s. These modest improvements underline the importance of programs that encourage early school leavers to return to post-school...

This paper uses survival analysis to model exits over time from two alternative notions of homelessness. We are unique in being able to account for time-invariant, unobserved heterogeneity. We find that duration dependence has an inverted U-shape with exit rates initially increasing (indicating...

The aim of this paper is to analyse work incentive effects from a recent change in the Australian tax and transfer system on sole parents. Two approaches are used in the analysis: microsimulation and quasi-experimental evaluation. Both approaches examine the effects on the probability of...

By OECD standards, the share of the Australian labour force with at least a secondary school qualification is low. One way to rectify this shortfall is to improve rates of re-engagement in education among early school leavers. This paper examines the patterns of re-engagement among early school...

Using Australian data spanning the period 1981 to 2001, we apply a propensity score reweighting decomposition approach to investigate the extent to which the large decline in the male employment-population rate over this period can be attributed to changes in sociodemographic characteristics. We...

Fragmented welfare service delivery has been identified as a significant barrier to improving outcomes for highly disadvantaged individuals. The ‘YP4’ trial, conducted from 2005 to 2009, sought to evaluate, by randomised control method, an approach proposed by Campbell et al. (2003) for...

This paper uses micro data from over 4000 Australian individuals to investigate which factors have had a significant influence on microeconomic wage growth over the past 3 years. The relative importance of four type of factors: outside incomes, demand for labour, workers' relative bargaining...