2002 saw the first large-scale survey of household wealth carried out in Australia since World War I. Conducted as part of the second wave of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (or HILDA) Survey, it covered all main components of asset portfolios and debts. This paper uses...

Previous research on union wage effects has underestimated the potential for unions to raise member wages since the data used do not enable differences across bargaining units to be properly accounted for. This study addresses this deficiency by utilising matched employer-employee data which...

Previous research hypothesizes that long working hours are related to consumerism, the ideal worker norm, high levels of human capital, and a high cost-of-job-loss. The authors test these hypotheses using panel data on working hours for an Australian sample of full-time employed workers....

The accepted view among psychologists and economists alike is that economic well-being has a statistically significant but only weak effect on happiness/subjective well-being (SWB). This view is based almost entirely on weak relationships with household income. The paper uses household economic...

We develop a typology for understanding couple households where the female is the major earner – what we term female breadwinner households – and test it using data from the first two waves of the HILDA Survey. We distinguish temporary from persistent female breadwinner households and...

This paper uses longitudinal data from Australia to examine the extent to which overskilling is a transitory phenomenon that declines with increased labour market mobility. The results suggest that while overskilled workers are more likely to want to quit, they are relatively unconfident of...

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...

A distinctive feature of the Australian labour market is a high incidence of casual employment. Almost 27 percent of Australian employees in 2006 were classified as employed on a casual basis, an alarmingly high proportion given the strong claims often made about the harmful effects that casual...

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...

We develop a typology for understanding couple households where the female is the major earner – what we term female breadwinner households – and test it using data from the first two waves of the HILDA Survey. We distinguish temporary from persistent female breadwinner households and...